The challenges system has always been about encouraging photography but we also wanted it to be a means of supporting and enhancing the challenges that already take place within specific forums. With this in mind, we’ve introduced Forum-associated challenges. Yesterday, we deployed this feature to DPReview for hosts to play with.

In recent weeks we have seen challenges established with themes that are relevant to specific forums – these have include brand-specific themes such as ‘Olympus DSLR Only’ or technique-specific themes like ‘Strobist’ or ‘Worthless Made Priceless’. Naturally these would have been particularly welcomed in the Olympus SLR Talk, Lighting Technique, and Retouching Forum, respectively.

To allow Challenge Hosts to make stronger links with those forums, they now have the option to specify which forums their challenge is particularly relevant to. Associating a challenge with a forum causes two things to happen to the recently introduced challenge widget that appears at the top of the forum pages.  Firstly, an associated challenge will appear more frequently in the widget so that users of that forum get to see the most relevant challenges but also, an associated challenge will start to appear when it first opens, rather than when it has finished. This way, users of the relevant forum will be much more aware that there’s a challenge aimed at them that they may wish to enter.

Winners of all challenges will continue to appear across the site but with the creation of associated challenges, there’s a way of promoting challenges for the communities that have built up within individual forums.

As announced before, we have recently formalized the camera selection process when uploading an entry to the challenges. This enables us to deliver an interesting new feature, statistics of cameras used in challenges.

You can access the statistics page directly from the URL (http://www.dpreview.com/challenges/stats) or through the menu on the left, under Challenges.

We used several terminologies on the statistics which may need description:

• Rank is determined by the number of entries submitted to any challenge using a particular camera during the week that ends on previous Sunday. For instance, if you access the page on Wednesday, 12 August, the statistics displayed is based on entries that was submitted from Satuday, 1 August through Saturday, 8 August.
• Users is determined by the number of unique user submitting at least one entry with a particular camera. A user can submit entries with two different camera and will be counted once on each camera.