Enabling and Running Contests

What are contests?

Contests on Common are weekly (7 day duration) competitions that can be hosted by admins of a Community that has Community Stake enabled. Admins have two different ways of funding contests

• By utilizing fees from Community Stake (Read more about Community Stake here)

• By only using direct deposits

The admin can use either one or both mechanisms together for funding their contests

Every contest requires at least one topic to be included in it. All new threads created in a topic with an active contest are considered entries into contest.

The thread with the most upvotes at the end of contest duration wins the contest and is rewarded the prize pool which is either funded by community stake purchases or funded directly using a token.

An example of a contest: Pitch an essay on the history of memecoins, include a title, a short summary of what your approach would be.

At the end of 7 days, the pitch with the most votes will get $1000 USDC or more to write the essay

Types of Contests

There are two types

• A one off contest that ends after 7 days

• A repeating contest that rewards a new winner every 7 days

Repeating contests are funded by utilizing fees from Community Stake. Read more about how Community Stake works here

Why should I run Contests on Common?

Contests on Common are a primitive that can be used to activate and increase engagement within a community. In this respect they are similar to quests such as Zeely or incentivized actions such as Boost.

The advantage of contests over the other primitives is that:

• Contests on Common do not take the users out of the user experience of the forum within which their community discussions happen

• Contests on Common allow you to create moments of high engagement in your community through collaboration and competition.

Using prizes, Contests on Common allows the admin to incentivize more of what they want to see in their community, e.g. this could be different forms of content such as memes and essays to small units of work similar to bounties.

Who can run Contests?

Only admins of communities that have Community Stake enabled can run contests. Admins can go to Admin Capabilities → Contests to enable contests for their community.

Who wins a Contest?

The thread with the most upvotes among the topics in which the contest is enabled will win the contest. You can create up to 10 winners for a given contest, in which case the top 10 most upvoted threads within the topics in which the contest is active would split the prize money according to the prize split that you have set (more on prize splits below).

How can I create a Contest?

• Go to Admin Capabilities → Contests

• Clicking on Launch a Contest will take you to the page to create a contest. Here you can input the name of contest. Best practice here would be to name it with the action that you want the community to take. eg: “Pitch essay topics for our blog” “Send us the best memes” “etc. You can also add a featured image. Best practice here would be to use an image that communicates your brand identity or create a custom image for all your contests on Common.

• In the next section, you decide whether you want to fund contests using fees generating from Community Stake or if you want to use direct deposits only. If you decide to use Community Stake, you are able to run weekly recurring contests that will utilize fees from your Community Stake purchases weekly. For your first contest, we recommend using Direct deposit only to fund your contest. (more on direct deposits later)

• Then you decide how the prize money would be split among contest winners. The thread with the most upvotes among the topics in which the contest is active will win the contest, the second most upvoted thread among all the topics in which the contest is active comes second and so on. You can split the prize money to up to 10 winners.

• Lastly, you can select the topics in your community in which a contest is active. We recommend that you only run one contest within a topic at a given time but technically you can run multiple contests within the same topic. During the duration of the contest, all the threads within a particular contest will automatically be entered into the contest. We recommend testing out contests in existing topics or creating a new topic that is exclusive to contests such as “memes” or “bounties”

How do direct deposits work?

Users will have the option to fund contests using token that are in their wallet that is connected to their Common Account. Example of what it looks like below:

Can the duration of the contests be adjusted?

At this moment all contests have a hard duration of 7 days.

How can users claim the prize amount for the contest?

The prize amount for the contest is deposited to the address of the users with the highest number of upvotes.

users need a non dust value of eth (>0.0001) in their wallet to participate in contests

How can admins promote contests?

Contests don’t have a page for themselves. They are cards that user can browse to understand the nature of the contest. Admins are able to link contests to a particular topic or multiple topics. The best way to promote a contest or provide detailed instructions would be to create a new thread for every contest or contest type and add the appropriate thread name and details. For example: If you are running a memes competition, create a topic called "Best Memes" and add details about the contest in the topic description

Can any community member start a contest?

No, only admins can start contests.

What are the fees on Contests?

Contests fees are currently 10% of the prize amount. 5% of this goes towards covering gas fees.

What is the fee manager?

The fee manager is used to distribute the fees generated from Community Stake. It's a contract/vault for a communities protocol fees to flow, so that they can be split up and distributed to other things like contests.

For example, if a community generates 1ETH of fees from community stake and has two contests with equal share, the ETH will flow to fee manager which distributes 0.5 ETH to each contest.

Is the fee manager enabled for communities with contests and for communities without contests?

Only communities that have contests will have the fee manager enabled. Communities that don’t have contest would be using the existing funding mechanism (stake funds going to the admin's wallet).