R.I.P Demelza

It is with great sadness that we have learned that Demelza, the real life puma that the club has been sponsoring for the last year, has passed away.

She had recently been suffering from a severe gum infection, it was decided that it would be a kindness to not wake her up from the anesthetic.

We will continue to sponsor Tyge, the other puma that resides at Shepreth Wildlife Park.

The death of Car of the Month

It is with some regret, and a great deal of disappointment that I have stopped Car of the Month. December submissions was the very last.

Now, on the forum, it was probably noticed that I had been kicking up a fuss over the last couple of months that it was running. Not everyone will ever see my my point of view, or even want to see it, and simply dismiss any complaints I had as me throwing my toys out of the pram. However, if you know me personally, and not just my online presence, you’ll know that I’m not the type of person to make snap decisions, nor am I easily annoyed.

If you’re at all interested, let me talk you through it.

I started COTM in May 2008 as a bit of fun; a way to give a little something back to the forum members that wouldn’t cost anything more than a little of my time. Originally, it was any car that you had owned, not just a puma, but other models just didn’t win. As the end of 2008 drew nearer, I decided that as we’d got a car per month, we could make a calendar for 2009. A flurry of submissions and voting found the four photos for January to April.

I searched for a suitable manufacturer to produce the calendars at a reasonable price, and eventually settled on one, which, if you’ve bought one of the calendars over the last 2 years, might have noticed was Vistaprint. Now Vistaprint have a minimum upload size for the photographs you can use in calendars, and some of the submissions were a fair bit smaller than this. Several hours of Photoshop manipulation later, all 12 photos had been scaled to the correct size, and as much pixellation as possible had been removed.

Now, I ordered a small amount of calendars, enough for one each for everyone who had a photo in the calendar, and a few more for anyone else who wanted one. I wasn’t intending to make a profit, and I didn’t, I just about broke even, and have still got half a dozen or so calendars sat in a box in our spare room.

It was due the upload restriction that I started to encourage a minimum size to the submissions. Not only because I couldn’t face the hours in photoshop again, but also because doing it that way loses some of the quality of the photo.

I tried to inject some variety into the photos by introducing monthly themes. I wanted to have a few shots that weren’t the usual 3/4 on shot that you’d find in a for sale advert. This had varying degrees of success. As always, there were complaints and grumbles about the choice of themes, and if they were really necessary. So much for that idea then.

2009 ticked by, and I had the 12 photos for the 2010 calendar, I uploaded them and ordered the smallest batch of calendars I could that would give me enough for one each for everyone who had a photo in there. Again, I didn’t expect to make a profit, but I also didn’t expect to end up out of pocket, and have a dozen or more calendars left over.

This is where I started to get a little irritated and disillusioned with the whole thing, but I carried on anyway, hoping that it was just a one off.

In an attempt to improve the quality of the photos used for the eventual calendar, I tried to be stricter on the submission sizes. This seemed to cause an inordinate amount of confusion, as submissions were posted in the thread, and invariably Photobucket would resize them smaller. To try and combat this, I switched to e-mail submissions only, again with varying degrees of success.

You may read that, and wonder what the hell I’m complaining about, after all, it’s natural to learn as you go along how things like this work, and how best to organise them. If that was the only issue, then I wouldn’t have closed the competition.

Month after month, I had to remind people to read the rules before they submitted an entry; mostly to meet the minimum size requirements, but also how to submit an entry. I won’t go into some of the more in depth discussions I’ve had with some over why I can’t bend the rules just this once.

Month after month, I saw the number of submission dwindle as the novelty seemed to wear off. And this is in no way detrimental to the people who did send me submissions; but barring one or two photos it is always the same few people.

Judging by the general lack of interest recently,  particularly well illustrated by the number of submissions for December, I made my mind up to quit. I also decided not to order a batch of calendars in advance, simply because I can’t afford to pay out nearly £200 with no guarantee of even getting that money back. Instead I made them available through Cafepress and in the interests of fairness, selected not to made any profit on sales. At the time of writing this, there have been exactly three orders for calendars.

All I can say is thank you to those who have supported COTM over the time that it has been running.