Be Excellent To Each Other

Are we all sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin

This year's Song Wars will be much the same format as previous ones. We'll have four groups, of either 5 or 6 people. Each week you'll chose a song, and they'll all be put into posts in this forum for viewers to vote on. After feedback from last year, we'll prevent switching votes, so pick carefully before you cast your vote.

Each week's deadline will be MONDAYS at 10PM. After that time the posts for the next week will go up. We'll be starting Week 1 on Monday 17th - so get your Week 1 song choices in before then. The first three weeks will have no theme. Weeks 4-8 will have their themes chosen by the losers in each group in weeks 1-5. There will then be a quarter final that will be four 1v1 matches, the best two from each group. Then a semi-final, two 1v1 matches, and a final. They will all by unthemed.

Submitting your songs works a bit differently this year. Song Wars III has a website! If you go to the website, you'll see the list of weeks down the left. Click on a week, and you'll be able to enter the details of your song from youtube, or upload an mp3 from your computer.

If you're entering a Youtube song, paste the video code into the Youtube code box. The code is the bit in the youtube URL that is after the 'v='. For example, if your video is:



Then the bit you enter into the box is u30n18MIeC0.
Enter the title and artist, and hit submit.

If you're entering an uploaded song, choose Uploader from the drop-down, and use the file upload link to add the file. The title and artist should be automatically picked up from the ID3 tags, but you can correct them if they're missing or wrong.

Hit submit and the website will confirm your submission.


You can submit songs in advance, if you're not going to be around for example, but don't forget that weeks 4-8 will have a theme added that you won't know until a couple of weeks in advance.

If the website thinks you're not playing, let me know in this thread. I've probably done a typo in your forum name.

So, off you go! The website is http://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/songwars/

When voting, what is the judging criteria? Do we pick the best song, or the best fit to the theme?
If it's the former, what happens when a song didn't really fit the theme at all?

I think it would be best to title them all 'Song A', 'Song B' etc, as some people just vote for the songs they've heard of, without listening to them at all.

That was painless to upload..

Done. There's a lot of ATeens tracks on Youtube, isn't there?

Every rose has a thorn ok?

It's people like you that let the nazis win.

It's not allowing me to upload, it goes through the motions, and then it stops, and the upload button is greyed out, but it tells me



Malc

Does it let you choose the file to upload?

Yeah, looks like it's uploading too, but then just stops. Tried twice.

I'll reboot later and see if that fixes it, if not, then I'll see if I can find the version I want on youtube.

Malc

So there's no theme at all until week 5?

Week 4! The theme is none for week 1-3.

Yeah, my bad. I've written 5-8 in the top post. I'll edit.

uploader still not working for me!

Malc

Firefox 15.01 on windows 7 home premium

Malc

Put your song on YouTube and then just link to it.

Is your song about 30 mins long? I struggled with large files last year.

Have you tried in another browser?

Has anyone else tried using the uploader?

yes, Mr Craster sir....

It works fine in chrome

THE THEME FOR WEEK ONE IS GANGNAM STYLE.

Oppa-Gangnam style!

The text entry box strips out single quotes, including legit apostrophes.

Obviously I don't care, but I'd hate to look illiterate.

(I care)

I'd care about that too. I'm avoiding songs with apostrophes in. (Theme for week 5, songs with apostrophes in.)

Yeah, it does. Because it was do that or bother to work out how to handle single quotes properly, and I couldn't be fucked.

add_slashes() and strip_slashes().
Maybe without the underscores.
Php is fun like that.

Nice website. I like it.

So at 10pm tonight the site will show everyones noms in groups?

How exciting!

The site will do dick all at 10pm. I'll be posting a thread in here as normal.

C-

Must try harder.

Can't the site create a thread here with the data we have given it?

That's what I thought it was for?

Malc

It could do, but creating a thread here is a minimal amount of manual work. Extracting details of songs from PMs and putting them in groups is a huge amount of manual work. So the site addresses the latter.

Can the site simulate the voting by reading all our posts and using a neural net to work out how we would vote.
It would save some hassle.

What a swizz.

Can't the site just pick a series of songs over a number of weeks (perhaps having a theme to the songs chosen some weeks?) Then it could show us the songs and then it can decide which is the best for us. Once it's done this for about 8 weeks, it could then pick one less song each week and again, tell us which is the best song that week.

After about 8 weeks of this it could then tell us that that "the Final Countdown" is the best song ever?

I keep meaning to mention that we should have a rule of not using songs from other Song Wars. There a re a fair few that have appeared in multiple competitions.

Bit too late now as it's all started though.

I agree with that but it'd be difficult to follow through with. I personally don't know which songs have been used in previous rounds and I imagine everyone else is the same.

Could impose a final round rule.

Easy.

Craster can list them all here.

is there a way of doing this a s podcast so I can listen to them in the car!

What happened to the:

1st choice - 3 points
2nd choice - 2 points
3rd choice - 1 points

with the votes?

I thought that was a good system personally.

We'll give it a go next week.

Good. Cause I'm doing shit so far.

do you vote in all groups including your own?

You can vote anywhere you please.

Fair enough... voted done

When does that course start?

Balls to the multi-voting! There's almost always a clear winner. I wind up just randomly assigning the other points usually. And get bored. Obviously.

I have to apply, will you check my form for me?