It's been a busy summer for me, and the last three "BiM 201_" summer contests have had fairly disappointing levels of participation, such that it's harder to get a good sponsor for the contest. Given that THAC has been so much more popular we've decided to focus on that competition annually instead of trying to organize two contests a year.

People on the forums are always welcome to put together their own, unofficial contests! If they appear to have things in order, the announcements are moved to the Contests forum.

Ever since the review panel was disbanded, this website has felt rather neglected to me.

Its no-ones fault. Everyone has lives outside this website, and obviously when choosing between a site about animating with children's toys and school/jobs/family/socialising/sunlight/sex etc - anyone with sense would pick the latter. Its just a shame that this website only really feels alive and active during THAC.

On a lighter note: I'm hoping for another BRAWL - though it'll probably occur whilst I'm on holiday...

I'm personally fine with no BiM 2013. I don't really see much of a point in a huge contest in which only about 10 people enter. Honestly, I was so disappointed in how BiM 2012 turned out, I didn't really watch any of the entries. Also, as many have said, it seems that the longer the contest, the less people enter.

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I want there to be, I'm new to this site so have never entered before.

What happened with the review panel is that the number of new submissions every week escalated to a point where no reasonably sized review panel was able to keep up with it. I figured it was better to just let everyone review films in the forums if they like than to have reviewers who aren't necessarily qualified writing "official" reviews for the site, which had led to a lot of hurt feelings over harsh reviews I didn't have the ability to screen personally.

If we had a new way of making the review panel work well, I'd be open to it. I did try quite a few different things without much success, though. The problem is that about 80% of the films posted on this site are very very beginner-level stuff that isn't much fun to watch if you've seen a lot of it already, so review panel members end up watching about as much of it as they can bear and then they stop posting reviews. This has been a consistent outcome; I've had many review panel members say they won't be like the others and they'll stick with it, but it never happens.

Or only review those with 4 bricks or higher?

This would encourage the already existing problem of using secondary accounts or friends to boost one's film rating. Which would take away any significance the rating has otherwise.

It's an interesting idea. No way to execute it automatically within the current site framework, and I don't know how you'd avoid needing to have to have a panel of, umm, review reviewers. Ultimately I guess I'm not keen on featuring anything that is automatically generated from user content, then presented in an "endorsed" capacity within the film directory.

I sort of feel like there's no integrity to that system if they're just well-written reviews by various forum members. Different peoples' taste and ratings differ, so I feel like for it to be worthwhile/meaningful you sort of need to have more rigid standards like the old review panel system did.

"Only reviewing the really good brickfilms" would require the reviewers to watch all the films submitted. This is basically what we were doing in the past, but it doesn't fix the problem of reviewers needing to watch a large number of films. The only equitable way of doing it is to watch pretty much everything, in which case review panel members will not stick with it for very long, because it's an unbearable task and they're not being paid.

The only exception would be films that get lots of comments and are obviously well-received in the forums. There aren't many of these and they're usually made by already popular brickfilmers, so they don't really need the extra attention in the directory anyway. I don't think it's worth doing unless we can devise a system that is a little more fair (mostly because I get lots of complaints whenever a less equitable system has been in place in the past).

I agree with the fact that there will always be some variance. I think having a free-for-all in which we just promote well-written reviews would mean that there's no standard or consistency at all, however. And even if we were willing to have that be the case, we'd need a review-review panel, which would lead us back to the same problem we already have.

I hope I'm not just sounding like a wet blanket, here. We didn't take ending the review panel lightly, but I've definitely become skeptical of the sustainability of a review panel system. There are reasons it was feasible a few years ago, and isn't, now.

In short: I'd love to bring back directory reviews in some fashion, but I'm not really motivated to try a new system unless somebody comes up with an idea that I am unable to shoot full of holes based on how things have gone in the past.