Summer Contest 2023, and future contests(?)

[mastergepetto]

Again, I think comments/questions regarding the Summer Story Contest 2023 are best posted on the original contest announcement thread because this thread is more about what to do about future contests.

However, regarding this contest and contests in general:
I created this year’s Summer Story Contest as an attempt to revive contests on this forum. I think many people would agree that participation in the most recent contests was unfortunately lacking. I thought including the images would be a fun, unique, and different feature to the contest which would hopefully inspire people to write stories— which is the whole point of reviving the contests: building participation.

I too LOVED the old contests that didn’t use photos and would LOVE to see more contests return! If you have an idea for another contest, please feel free to make one! I have already started formulating ideas for future contests that don’t use images but are still unique.

[Executionus]

Honestly I loved the idea of using pictures as the prompts for this contest, but obviously that's not going to be a thing every time. In cases where a reader prefers stories without pictures, it's usually easy to just ignore them (the ones I did for the Thirst Games stories were entered as links you had to click on).

One of the pictures for this contest (that nobody used yet) somewhat inspired me a little, but I might not get around to actually writing an entry with it due to how busy I am these days.