This will become more and more of an issue over time. We might decide to raise the bar to move from candidates to top (currently 5), your suggestion might also be a solution. I think in any case that we need to give more moderating power to the community members who are expert on given subjects. We are working on this and will post news on this in the forum in the near futre.

I think the voting feature is a little confusing.  It says to indicate if the photo is relevant, or not.  However, I think it is also being used as a rating system, i.e. people are using it to indicate which photos they think are best.

So, perhaps we need two types of vote per photo.  One for indicating if the photo is relevant, and one for rating photos.

Then the highest rated photos could be shown on the top page, the remaining relevant photos on a secondary page, plus any candidates on the candidates' page.

I;m with Dan on this. If a limit on nominations is imposed it should be able to be applied on a selective basis - i.e. topics with high traffic will need it and others will not. Additionally if it is implemented it should be implemented in conjunction with the ability for a photographer to be able to withdraw or delete nominations. Otherwise a topic will be effectively barred to a contributor if their nominations are not voted on - this often seems to happen with the current voting system in Fotopedia. Topics like "Puppy" get a lot of attention & other, more esoteric topics get less. This, fact, in conjunction with the current implementation of the voting system means that photos submitted to less popular topics may not be voted on and just disappear.  One way that might ameliorate this particular issue is to automatically resubmit photos for voting after an elapsed time period - implement a "time to live" so they are not resubmitted continually and remove them from candidature if they are not voted up. This would go some way to solving the "Italy holiday photo problem", ensure that submissions get  proper exposure for voting & remove clutter from the encyclopedia automatically.

After consideration I dont think that a selective limit on nominations is feasible due to practical issues of selecting which topic to apply it to. However I fully support limiting the number of nominations in the way proposed by Nilson if it is implemented along with the ability to withdraw nominations.

I see the following advantages:

More care will be applied to selecting candidates by contributors - and this will help with quality

The voting queue will be less populated allowing candidate photos more exposure for voting

I also suggest that candidate photos which attract a negative vote past a defined threshold are removed automatically from canditure. this along with the ability to withdraw nominations will ensure that topics are not blocked to a contributor once the limit of nominations are reached.

Thanks for all your input, we are listening to this discussion with lots of interest. It will guide us while we are trying to find what is best here.

responding to Jeff's message: yes photos with negative votes will disappear from the candidates pool after a while.

I agree, a permanent queue of 5 nominated images is a cool feature and will force us to post permanently our best stuff, but please do not limit the number if images per author!

Exactly, some articles contain way too many photos! I think 50 top photos per article is more than enough. Like that, only the best would be exposed.

Update on the progress on this issue:

To limit the clutter and encourage members to submit their best photos to articles:

- we plan on limiting the number of nominations per day per article per person. Check out this forum entry to comment on it.

- we can now change on each article the number of votes needed to make it to the top. The default being 5. This will be interesting for articles where there are many contributions. In the Flower article the limit is 10 for example. The number of votes a photo needs to get to reach the top is mentioned on the vote overlay in the candidates tab.

I think a possible solution would be a sliding scale for number of votes required to get into the top list.  The larger the collection, the more votes required.  The only problem with this is it would automatically bounce photos back into the candidate list that are no longer qualified under the new minimum number.  I don't know about others, but I would not have a problem with my photos being pushed back to candidate status in the interest of improving the quality of the collection.  As it is I have photos that bounce in and out regularly, because they only have 5 votes.

Another problem I see is some collections have photos in the top 5, or so, that are no longer the best in the collection, but with the number of votes they have it's unlikely they will ever loose ground.  If for no other reason, members are told if they vote the wrong way their number of votes will be reduced, so who's going to vote down an image with 44 votes? :-)

A possible solution would be to let members vote for a complete revisit of a collection.  I'm not sure what the magic number would be, but it certainly would need to be much more than 5 votes.  If the community decides that a topic needs re-voting, then all the images would drop down to the minimum number of votes required to be in the top list for that collection.  At the same time, the topic would be featured, for several days, so everyone would know a re-vote is taking place, which in turn would give the topic a burst in voting participation. With the added participation, even the candidates would get extra exposure and stand a chance of getting in, while the playing field is level. Of course, some of the photos already voted in would get bounced out, because it would only take one vote to remove them.  All things considered I think it would make for a very good house cleaning.

While I've seen a number of smaller collections that could stand a re-vote, its probably best to limit this process to the larger ones.  If the process works well with the larger collections, then consider applying it to the smaller ones.

If there are any concerns over abuse, simply restrict voting, for the re-vote, to those that do not have any photos in the top or candidate list for that article.

Sorry Adrian, I missed your post that the sliding scale has already been implemented.