plk Posted:

If you want to win a category for the week, the way to do this is to put all of your submissions into it. I’m not sure why people only seem to care about forum ideas when this is the way it works for any category and it’s the way it’s always been. All categories usually have over 100 submissions to vote on, but I never hear anyone complaining that they’re being forced to vote on too many Angry Replies or Typical Posts. And I certainly never hear people getting accused of flooding those categories, even though it’s usually the same person who gets the most overall submissions into the forum week after week.

Based on what I’ve seen in the posts, the complaint is that you at least have to make some effort to tailor other submissions to this week’s forum, whereas with forum suggestions, you can just slowly stockpile the ones that get good votes, and they’re just as applicable every week you submit them.

In other words, the Typical Post that got 40 upvotes on SPAM probably won’t work if you just resubmit for Childhood Trauma Forgettance… but if your Forum Idea gets 40 upvotes, you can resubmit, unchanged, next round, and probably get something in the same neighborhood. This allows you to build an increasing arsenal of forum suggestions to resubmit, tweaking them every week and weeding out losers, which you can’t really do (as successfully) with Angry Replies or Typical posts. Those you generally have to make up new every week, you can’t let a few months of “natural selection” to find your hundred best ideas and present those.