BasharOfTheAges wrote:
Well, in this context it's already a category up for voting on instead of a rule. If it got enough entries to go on to be an official category, jingoro would have to delete the entries within it that don't fit (either explicitly by taking them off the list, or implicitly by throwing away votes behind the scenes). I could point to nine of them; I'm sure someone like Vlad could point to a few more given how many contests he runs. But ultimately, to be sure, people would have to volunteer to out themselves. It could easily be done, if that category got the votes to become real.
The other option would be a special script where the person who made one that's not new could go to the vote page and select "Withdraw video from voting" but there's be several things to include:
1. The creator's videos would need to be linked to the account so only they could remove videos
2. Everyone would need to be honest and actually remove it if they had premiered it already
1 is easy, 2 is impossible to enforce. There are a lot of participants who just upload the videos and then do nothing else (download, review and vote) meaning that anyone who does that, if they've entered elsewhere won't remove their video. Then you'll also have people who won't do it just because they don't care and would take advantage of it. IIRC I believe there was a stink at one con one year where the video that won was actually just the opening intro to a game, directly lifted and submitted. If there are people out there willing to go that far then it's really not that much of a reach to see people not withdrawing videos from voting.
To be honest, if we really want a "new video" category, the way I'd go about implementing it is just to have a field in the electronic entry form labeled "Participation" where people can check a yes no box that says "Has this video participated in another contest" if they check yes and add this as one of the "Permanent" categories that show up every year then it'd be a simple flag that it looks for when listing the videos in that category for voting. People can still take advantage of it and select no anyway, but at the same time there's a huge community of people out there. Even if they did all the contest admins would need to do is check the 4 or 5 videos that made it to final voting to see if it's been uploaded/premiered on the org or at other conventions. If it has, then they can DQ it and go with the runner up.
Gimme a minute, I'll make a cool one....