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.
