Tom Q.

In order for the "professional judge" to even see the finalist photos (generally about 50 or so I believe), the photos must first be rated as the most popular by the viewbug members. When I joined I took this to heart and tried to participate by rating photos. One contest ending this week already has over 28,000 entries and presumably will end with approximately 30,000 entries. Viewbug's voting process requires you to view 4 photos per page and choose the top one or two (or none) on each page. 30,000 entries would be 7500 pages. Assuming a minimum fair appraisal time of 10 seconds per page that is equivalent to about 21 HOURS of non-stop viewing/voting. So if you dedicated yourself to this as you would a full-time job (8 hours of work per day) it would take almost three days (assuming lunch and time-out breaks) to vote on ONE contest. Keep in mind that there are contest closing virtually every day... so it is literally impossible to try to participate in voting on them. So, what inevitably must be happening is good-hearted folks start the process, vote on some photos for an hour or so, get bored and more on to something more meaningful in their lives. Thereby voting for whatever photos were in the first few hundred pages... and never seeing the remaining thousands of pages where the top photos likely lurk. Perhaps I am missing something and the process doesn't really work this way. If so, I would love to hear how it really works.