Design Court

Design court needs improvements.

1. Accused designer needs to be notified by email that design court has been thrown against him.

2. Court should have a discussion phase first. After discussion phase is finished, goes a poll's phase.

3. All persons who voted during the poll phase needs to be reveled after the end of voting.

4. The final decision should be left for admin.

5. Voter should get some rating points for his contribution to community.

6. Voters should have some decent ranking points to have an ability to participate in polls (to exclude amateurs from the voting process)

7. We desperately need the ability to witdraw our entries. Ideally, if someone sees the copyright infringement, or rules violation, the problematic entry goes to court. If designer agrees that he/she wasn't right, he should have the right to withdraw his problematic entry without penalties. If he/she refuses to do that, after voting phase penalties apply (in case of loosing) – infraction and removal designer from the contest entirely with all his entries in the particular contest.

8. Judge-made law principle must be applied for consistency and fairness (similar cases should have the same result)

9. In case of loosing a court by the guy who opened a case, needs to loose rating points – a certain way of punishment for wasting valued time of the participants and groundlessness accusations.

You bring up some good points eximius. I was also wanting to question why the designer is not notified by email if there is some sort of infringement case against them in the Designer's Court. If the designer in question doesn't check the forum, they might not even know and will not have a chance to defend their design or at least give explanation (if needed).

Until Designer's Court, I didn't realize there were sooo many reported entries. Some are obvious infringements (i.e. using clip/stockart, stealing an existing logo, copying/stealing another designer's logo or unique concept, breaking rules, etc.) but some of the reported entries have not been justified and some are on a fine line. For those cases, I think it is a good idea to give the designer a chance to justify/explain their actions and also give them the option to withdraw that design or risk receiving an infraction if found guilty of infringement.

Hopefully some (if not all) of your suggestions can be implemented.

I also think the whole concept of 'unique concept' needs to be revisited with more exact rules and regulations if possible.

A lot of reported designs claiming this are clean cut cases and should be eliminated (with infraction). However, there are some that have been unfounded in my opinion. I have even seen some designers throwing a quick design in the contest as fast as they can and making a comment that it looks rough and they will come back later and fix it, but they didn't want anyone else to steal THEIR concept. Not very professional. I can only imagine how the CH feels.

Most of the points you bring up would not work in many cases........

1. entry remains in contest until decided, what you suggest would prolong the court on that entry allowing several things to happen

2. the main goal is to decide and have that entry removed as soon as we can if it is in violation, if it is a copy why leave the entry in the contest the extra amount of time?

3. voters will not be revealed...why does everyone need to see what way someone voted? doesn't make any sense and besides keeping the voters hidden will make more vote.

4. Yes we do need some kind of point loss for unfounded or revenge reporting.

I can and will suggest an email go to the designer the design court is about and few of the other issues.

we have already made it so you can withdraw your entry when contest is closed or abandoned, we will not make an option to withdraw your own while the contest is active, this looks bad to the contestholder as well as DC. When a ch see a bunch of withdrawn entries it is bad.....

if you need to withdraw something simply send an email or come to live chat

One more thing, I do over-ride if I feel the need is there

Thanks Sharie~ I do think it is a good idea for email notification if your design ends up in 'court' for whatever reason.

Regarding withdrawing an entry that has been reported. At that point, I was thinking the designer could have the option to tell admin that they would like you to just go ahead and withdraw the entry in question. With doing that, maybe then they wouldn't receive an infraction? Not sure how that would work - maybe for first time offenders? They would receive one 'get out of jail free' card. If the designer would rather their design be voted on and it is found to be an infringement, then the design would be removed and infractions would occur.

"Most of the points you bring up would not work in many cases........" – these things work nicely on other websites actually )) Maybe I omitted some details, but you have your own developers and a vision how these things should work. The problem is that your devs try to put everything in this forum engine and are reluctant to develop your own DC engine. Tons of hacks and modifications... I am saying this, because I am not only a designer, but also an experienced web developer and programmer.

... well, it's always easy to criticize everything we propose than actually implement.. Same thing was with blind contests, with briefs, with court itself, withdrawals, rating points etc, now this... DC develops extremely slow. Shame, I really want to make DC a better place to work.


1. "entry remains in contest until decided, what you suggest would prolong the court on that entry allowing several things to happen" – can't see your point on this. What things? There are lots of things could be done here, for instance – having a judging phase in general, when all issues could be solved...

2. "the main goal is to decide and have that entry removed as soon as we can if it is in violation, if it is a copy why leave the entry in the contest the extra amount of time?" – Stock/art and serious violations should be deleted by mod right away. In general you can give 24 hrs for court (1 day judging period let's say) this will be enough for you (as a mod) and us (voters) to decide which designs are legitimate. Recently I participate in several contests, and many reported designs were in contest till the end...

3. "voters will not be revealed...why does everyone need to see what way someone voted? doesn't make any sense and besides keeping the voters hidden will make more vote" – it makes a perfect sense to discover cheats and inconsistent voters, who twist the notions, vote for revenge. Ideally, I prefer to see voters who participated in the discussion first, so defendant and mods can see their arguments. To raise the amount of voters you should give smth them (rating, points, contribution points, etc).

Again ability to withdraw reported entries will improve court system and general flow, ideally with the option of PrivateMessages (Should be some kind of rule like: PM first, than court)

And I still don't understand why we can't remove at least ELIMINATED designs and how this harm CH and DC. THIS doesn't make any sense Our designs are stuck for several months in most contests. Every 3d contest takes forever.

Edited by eximius, 10 January 2013 - 07:31 AM.

The only point I agree fully with is:

Accused designer needs to be notified by email that design court has been thrown against him.

.

Voter should get some rating points for his contribution to community

- only for: inappropriate content, clip art, mock up & copy of existing logo.

Agreed Babba maybe a deduction of rating points from offender goes back to active members in design court?