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We’re excited to announce a great new contest built around Marvel’s epic 12 issue Avengers vs X-Men limited series, which is this year's big Marvel event!

The goals of this contest are two-fold:

  1. To encourage our awesome users to generate quality content about both topics, and reward them for their work.
  2. To broadcast our site to a wider comic book and sci-fi enthusiast audience across the internet.

Using official art that we obtained through working with Marvel Comics, our design team created a cool mini site to reflect the contest's progress. The contest will pit the site's X-Men questions versus the site's Avengers questions in a battle to see which tag can get the most views! You will easily be able to see which team is winning moment by moment by checking the special mini site (avx.stackshowdown.com). We have also produced several fun videos in concert with this event, which will viewable on the mini site and on our YouTube channel gradually over the next two weeks. Watch them, enjoy them and share with your social network if you like them!

The contest model is very similar to the Skyrim vs Modern Warfare 3 showdown promotion that was run on Gaming last fall. That promotion was a huge success for Gaming, so we hope this contest will be similarly beneficial to SciFi & Fantasy. Please participate and share this contest with your friends!

When is this event?

  • The event starts next week, on April 4th at 3:00 PM UTC. It will run through to April 19th at 3:00 PM UTC.

How do you participate in this event?

  • Any questions and answers posted during this stretch of time tagged either or will be eligible.
  • While the impetus behind this event is the Avengers vs. X-Men mini-series, the emphasis is on the entirety of those two franchises. Questions about old X-Men stories, new Avengers stories, movies, cartoon, mythology, etc. are all fair game. Basically if it fits within the scope of the tag, ask it and answer it.
  • The mini-site will be tracking the number of views that questions tagged receive versus those tagged . Right now the X-Men already have a strong lead just based on the amount of content on the site. Avengers fans, assemble and ask your Avengers questions!

Who are the winners?

  • After the contest ends, the team with the most views will win. A Grand Prize Winner will be drawn randomly from all of the users that participated in the winning team's tag.
  • Four additional winners will be chosen: the user who asked the Top Avengers Question, the user who asked the Top X-Men Question, the user who provided the Top Avengers Answer and the user who provided the Top X-Men Answer.

The official rules and the prizes are here.

Thanks to Katey for helping me with this Meta post. She's been a tremendous help with this event!

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    I can't wait until you can unveil the site. It looks pretty kickass.
    – hairboat Staff
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 20:16
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    I'm voting to close Katey's profile because it has a list! Great promotion otherwise!
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Commented Mar 31, 2012 at 10:34
  • How unfair that it doesn't start after the Avengers movie launch :P
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Apr 1, 2012 at 6:01
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    @IvoFlipse Not unfair at all because it's for Avengers vs. X-Men, the comic book, which starts Wednesday. :P
    – Brett White Staff
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 13:45
  • But do they both have an equivalent amount of content out there upon which we can base questions? :P
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 13:57
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    @IvoFlipse Both the Avengers and X-Men have 49 years worth of content (a combined 1000+ comic books, 175+ episodes of television, etc). Much more than the Avengers film which has, at this point, 5 related films and a handful of trailers.
    – Brett White Staff
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 14:00
  • Ok, you've convinced me! Now I just need to get my hands on some of those comics
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 14:01
  • How a question about the "Avengers vs. X-Men" series should be tagged and how will it be counted for the event?
    – DavRob60
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 16:11
  • Full instructions will be on the site, but users will tag with either 'avengers' or 'x-men' since it's a competition between the two groups.
    – Katey HW Staff
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 17:26
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    @DavRob60 I think that questions about Avengers vs. X-Men should count towards both the Avengers and the X-Men. Will have a definite answer soon.
    – Brett White Staff
    Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 17:28
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    Everyone be on guard to retag and clear up questions from new users! Be aware there is a comics and marvel-comics tag!
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Commented Apr 4, 2012 at 16:45

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The event is over and the winners have been announced. Bounce over to the Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog for the announcement!

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I have serious concerns about these kind of contests. They seem to result in a large quantity of low quality questions, and the swamping of other content on the site.

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    If you're concerned about it swamping content, then you can set your "ignore" tags to "Avengers" or "X-Men."
    – Brett White Staff
    Commented Apr 5, 2012 at 13:53
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    Have you actually ever tried that? You'll find it simply "greys out" the ignored posts without affecting your view, so the screen is still swamped with "noise". Also, that does nothing to address the problem of low quality questions. The site only remains useful if the quality of questions and answers is good.
    – Christi
    Commented Apr 5, 2012 at 23:57
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    New users frequently struggle with our questions of quality... At first. The purpose of this quality is to draw in new users. Just as with any users, poor quality questions will be voted down or closed, and the new users will hopefully learn about our expectations. However, since they coming in through the contest page, which has a section on how to ask good questions, our quality expectations have higher than usual visibility for these new users.
    – Beofett
    Commented Apr 6, 2012 at 11:48
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    Christi, this is why I've been going round and trying to fix/edit/close/flag the poorly written and poorly posed questions. I get props to do so via badges etc. The community ends up with better questions, and the people who write poor questions either leave or improve. And thus the circle of stackexchange continues. To properly hid ignored questions go here and select hide ignored tags.
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Commented Apr 11, 2012 at 11:10
  • @Christi scifi.stackexchange.com/users/preferences/1459 - check the 'hide ignored question' checkbox
    – Yi Jiang
    Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 11:17

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