helping points for contests

Are you referring to the official Khan Academy contests?  They used to have a subscription thread for that that would notify people when a new contest was released, but it stopped working when too many people signed up, and they have not implemented any other way to notify people.

I suggest tagging Evan Lewis specifically, as the official contests are hosted on his account.  (He's usually helpful, but very very busy.)

Yes I am referring to the official KA contests.

how would I 'tag' evan lewis?

To tag Evan Lewis in a Support Community comment, start typing "@Evan Lewis".  When you see his avatar in the popup box, select it and press Enter.  When you press the blue Submit button, his name should turn blue in the posted comment.

thank you!

Thanks for sharing FURY[KINDA DED]! I'll share this with the rest of the contests team as well.

I've already put in a request for a better contest notification system, but that's not likely to be prioritized by the engineering team at the moment.

Usually the PJS entry page doesn't show up on the Hot List (because it can't receive votes), but the HTML entry page does show up. We don't ever remove that one from the Hot List, so it will stay on there as long as it keeps receiving votes (which is usually for a few days).

We've talked about doing different badge designs before, but we ended up deciding to change to the Sun badge theme for a couple of reasons:

• It's easier for us to make the badges unique to each contest using the Sun badge theme. This is something that many users had requested, and from a design standpoint the Golden Winston design was too difficult for us to customize for each contest.
• The contest badges are in the "Sun Badge" category, so it made sense to have them visually resemble the Sun Badges. We also wanted to keep the visual design in line with the other Khan Academy badges.
• Because of the above two reasons, we also decided not to make separate badges for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.

While we're not doing separate badges for each place, we did add something new recently---honorable mentions! If a high-effort entry isn't selected as a winning entry, we will still give it a shout-out on the contests page.

If you (or anyone else) thinks of any other ideas, please continue to share them here! Thanks for your help!

okay! thank you!

Evan Lewis

I'm glad you added honorable mentions. 
I got rather discouraged when the program that I spent dozens of hours on over the entire 2 months, using several advanced techniques that I had never used before or had not used in 5-10 years, got 3 votes and no feedback from anyone.  (That motivated me to look at as many of the other entries as I could manage, vote up the ones that showed effort, and leave positive messages where it seemed earned.)