Bloomingpedia:Mystery Picture Submission Guidelines

The Mystery Picture of the week is one way that the Bloomingpedia Council tries to attract people to the website and have more fun. In the past it has been updated every week by Mark Krenz and then by Chris Eller. Now we'd like to open the floor and encourage everyone to get involved.

Guidelines

If you would like to submit a mystery picture for a week, please follow these guidelines:

1. Register an account on Bloomingpedia as well as on the Bloomingpedia Forums.
2. Between Monday and Saturday of the week prior to the week you'd like to submit for, post a message on the "Organize Your Efforts" Bloomingpedia forum stating that you would like to submit an image for the following week.
3. On Sunday of the previous week between 4pm and 6pm EST/EDT, upload your mystery picture with the name 'Mystery-picture-YYYYWW.jpg', where YYYY is the year and WW is the number of the week. The WW part does not need to be zero padded for week numbers less than 10. A template for the wiki will automatically include your image on the front page. Although you may need to use this link to make it update itself.] The time on the server is in the GMT timezone, meaning that 7pm is midnight during non-daylight savings time periods of the year.
4. If you say that you will submit an image but do not submit it by 6pm on Sunday, we will submit an image in your place.
5. Keep and eye on the talk page for the mystery picture to see if someone has correctly guessed what the picture is.
6. If nobody guesses the picture after a few days, try adding a hint to the talk page. If nobody guesses the image after 7 days, go ahead and give the answer on the talk page.

Tips

Use these tips to help make a challenging and interesting mystery picture.

• Pick something that is specific and doesn't have multiples around town (for instance, a newspaper stand isn't a good mystery picture because it could be anywhere.)
• Pick something that is in a public place and doesn't require special previleges to visit or see.
• Picking something that still exists would be ideal unless it is something that is generally well known, like a previous university building.
• Cropping the image so that there are slight clues is a good idea as it allows hard images to still be guessed by people who have a keen eye. For instance, the mystery picture of Black's Merchantile has a small reflection of the blue awning from Rockits Famous Pizza in it.
• Give a clue to the image every couple days for images that haven't been guessed.
• Try not to make your mystery picture too obscure because otherwise nobody will guess it.
• Look through the previous mystery pictures so as to not duplicate one of them.