A new product was added to our portfolio of available applications: the "Voting Contest" application. The Voting Contest application allows you to organize a contest where participating users can vote online for their favorite candidates. Voting candidates can be uploaded by the contest organizer, or by participating users themselves by submitting their photos, videos, projects or stories.

It is the ideal application to organize prize contests based on popular vote or organize photo, video or story contests. The app includes a fraud monitoring system to detect and block users who try to insert fraudulent votes.

The objective of the Voting Contest is to unify in a single application the different Easypromos applications used to organize contests: the Photo Contest, the Video Contest, the Writing Contest, the Pick your favorite and the Multimedia Contest.

For this reason, along with the launch of the new Voting Contest, the following changes have been applied to the products mentioned above:

1. The "Vote your favorite" and "Multimedia contest" applications have been removed, so new products of this type cannot be created.
2. The "Photo Contest", "Video Contest" and "Text Contest" applications have been classified as "Old" applications within the Easypromos product portfolio, which means that they can still be used, but are expected to disappear in a future. Check here the statement where we explain this change in detail.

Thus, these applications that until now were part of the Easypromos product portfolio, have now been unified into a single product called "Voting Contest", and which has been redesigned with a more modern style, new functionalities and with more customization and configuration options.

To facilitate implementation, the administrator can select among two different templates. The selection is made in the contest creation process, to choose the type of contest you want to organize according to the way in which the content will be generated and uploaded:

1. User Generated Content (UGC): allows you to organize a contest in which users upload content to be published in a gallery. The promotion administrator will be able to decide the content format that users can upload (photos, videos, texts and/or other formats) and enable voting in the gallery. It is the recommended option to organize the following types of contests:

• Photo contest.
• Video contest.
• Story competition.
• Nominations.

2. Content uploaded by the contest organizer: allows the organizer to create a gallery to present content for users to vote for their favorite(s). In this case, users will participate only by voting for the content created and selected by the organizer. It is the recommended option to organize the following types of contests:

• Awards by voting.
• Vote for your favorite candidate.

You will find the "Voting Contest" app under the "Contests" category:

You can find more information about the "Voting Contest" application and test demos here and how to set up the promotion step by step in this tutorial.

Additionally, with the upload to production of the "Voting Contest" application, the following changes and improvements have been implemented:

1. New option: "Request nomination information"

In contests where users are uploading content to nominate someone else or upload a candidacy that is not in their name, under the "Upload your entry" participation stage, you can enable the "nomination information" screen, where users will indicate details about the entry. 

For example: entering a musical band in the contest, contests for the best project where the whole team is presented by one of the members, etc.

2. Candidate management

You can now manage the photos, videos and other content uploaded by the users from the Editor > Participation Stages, under the new "Candidate Management" tab:

By entering the category, you will access and see the list of all the candidates uploaded to the contest, and will have the tools to manage participation:

1. Validate and moderate the participations, being able to mark the participation as:

• Pending.
• Accepted.
• Refused.

2. Edit the participation, which allows you to make any changes to the application information (change the name, description, delete or upload new media, etc.).

3. Add an internal note to the participation.

3. New option: "Users can only vote"

If you only want to show a Gallery where users will enter to vote their favorite(s), the option "Users can only vote" has been enabled, which causes the main "Enter/Participate" button that appears on the Welcome page to take users directly to the Voting Gallery.

Additionally, if the Welcome page is unpublished, the main link of the promotion will take visitants directly to the Gallery, thus improving the voting user experience. This configuration option is found in the Editor > Pages > Welcome section: