Sitepoint Contests, an Update.

I recently revisited the NO-SPEC page about sitepoint Contests, and stumbled upon this great first hand account, by user Leahzero, of what participating in a sitepoint contest is like.

My attitude towards Sitepoint has changed drastically after about two months of participating frequently in contests (both logo and web design).

Got tired of dealing with:

- Contest holders who abandon their contest, never declaring a winner or awarding a prize.

- Contest holders who declare that none of the 300+ submissions to their $100 (minimum prize) logo contest are good enough. (LOL.)

- Contest holders who don’t provide feedback, provide misleading feedback, or are otherwise inept communicators.

- Contest holders who accept lower bids under the table from designers who are trying to avoid working on spec by underbidding.

- Contest holders who display abysmal taste and choose terrible designs by unskilled hobbyists.

- Contest holders who have no idea what they want and mislead entrants into refining a design that they don’t really like.

- “Designers” who brazenly plagiarize copyrighted works, illustrations, templates, and other entrants’ submissions.

- “Designers” who trash talk others when said plagiarism is exposed and cast a bad light on those with integrity and the courage to speak up.

- “Designers” who are willing to underbid everyone, to the point of marginal pay, simply to “win” a contract–who have no concept of the value of the work but treat the process as some kind of game.

- “Designers” who devalue the work of others by not respecting their own worth and demanding adequate pay for good work.

- Overall atmosphere of cut-rate amateurism, hostility, philistinism, theft, etc.

Two months of it is plenty for me. I’m done. I would rather temp-to-perm and be treated with the modicum of respect that comes along with working in the 9 to 5 world than waste any further time with that scum.

Sitepoint could go a long way towards flushing out the corruption by simply implementing a mandatory escrow service. The most serious issue for me was deadbeat contest holders. Even the upfront fee the site charges to run a contest doesn’t seem to deter them anymore–it’s still cheaper than paying out the promised minimum prize. Forcing the contest holders to put the prize into escrow and finding some fair way to award it should the CH abandon the contest would remove a huge proportion of the fraud taking place there now–removing the contest abandonment and underbidding issues in one fell swoop.

It still wouldn’t convince me to waste a minute more of my time at Sitepoint, though. I see a trend of good designers leaving that site as they realize it’s not worth their time. Maybe in the past, before the contests were so popular, it was a reasonable risk to compete against other talented designers and win a bit of extra cash now and then, but the good days (if there ever were any) are long gone.

It makes me depressed about the future of design work in general.

To read the full discussion visit the NO-SPEC article The Spec Trap: Sitepoint.