Right now we have two writing competitions going on, and the second competition pushed the first one from the contest bar on the main page, which means the first doesn't get as much attention as the second.

Wouldn't it be better to alternate the competitions? Launch the second when the first is done. Or was it done on purpose to have two competitions at the same time?

Yes, the contest section is looking kinda sorry on the front of contestants/voters, and having two contests run side by side instead of back to back will likely result in both contests receiving fewer contestants than they would otherwise.

If I had to speculate, I'd say that there's a chance that the reigns are changing hands. Alternatively, it could be that the new contest mod is eager to get his feet wet with their own contest. Either way, their avatars are Petyr Baelish and some assassin dude, so you know it's some shady stuff.

Fortunately, we don't need to speculate.

@Frizan@Jorick

Yooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo contest staff, what's up with this contest double whammy?

The reason why there are concurrent contests running comes from an idea Ruby had. Her view of things was that if we had different contests of different types running at the same time, it would draw more people in due to the greater variety of prompts to write for. I agreed, as it seemed a good idea, and at the very least it would be worth it to try. To this end, she drafted Jorick to assist me in running contests to help facilitate the creation of different styles of contests.

The scheduling of the contests and when the Current Contest widget changes hands was suggested by Jorick himself. Verbatim:
"Currently I'm thinking of getting my contest up and running on the 19th, which would give me 2 weeks of using the Current Contest box before the voting period for RPGC starts. I'm not sure how long you let voting go, but my best guess after checking thread creation times is that you give at least 4 weeks for that too? My current plan is to run an entire contest each month, 3 weeks for submission and 1 week and change for voting. I'll be starting each prompt submission period on the third or fourth Friday of each month, adjusting as needed to make sure my voting period starts in the second week of the following month. That should give you at least the first week, sometimes almost two weeks, of each month to keep RPGC's stuff in the spotlight before my contest's voting period begins and takes over the Current Contest box."

To that I agreed as well, under the thinking that people already generally know of the main writing contests, and that Jorick's could use more advertisement, what with them being a new addition.

As for @BrokenPromise's concern: No, the contests section is not changing hands. It has simply been given a couple of new ones to work with.

And to add to the above, if the overlapping contests end up seeing depressed turnout then we can always change course and do something different. This first couple months is going to be a trial period, nothing is set in stone.

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.