November 2013: http://techspy.com/user/blo...

March 2012: http://techspy.com/user/blo...

These seem similar to what you are talking about, November 2013 featured Story, Comment and Manager of the Month categories that were chosen by me and Racer. They seemed to gather a mediocre following and haven't been used much and the overall traffic of both Stories and Comments seemed to dip a bit as a result.

March 2012 featured a TechSpy MVP contest where we chose the best overall user that we felt contributed postively to the site and community as a whole. This one can be brought back but again people seemed to prefer the "Straight answer" on what it took to get a prize for the month.

I agree for the most part and have tried to spread the prizes around even with the lotteries to get more users involved monthly with the contests but at the end of the day the best way seems to be rewarding the most active members and at least with the score it's a clear way to gauge who has been adding to the site the most for a given month. While obviously still being short of ideal in the long run.

I will go to the drawing board and try to spread it around more next month as this contest was another trial run for future contests to see how this News/Managing combo works out...

As for the Heat Index. It's above my control/paygrade and with the owners feverishly working on the major update for the entire Newsboiler network, this won't really be changed until then. But considering me and Racer submit stories and have access to the exact number of views/clickthroughs we know when people are forcing the heat index up unfairly but can't catch all instances of the problem.