Biweekly and 2-3 hours. Any more and people won't come/won't have the adrenalin rush from making a map in a very short amount of time. Also, not saturdays please.

THIS

I think most of the people here are over-estimating their enthusiasm for 3 hour mapmaking sessions every two weeks. But hey, we're mappers... I guess we're kind of known for that?

Said 2-3 and monthly.

Daily and 3 hours would be bad. Ideas would be exhausted.

Ideas? Psh, just make zombie maps. ENDLESS LOW QUALITY ZOMBIE MAPS, IT'LL BE LIKE well, normal bnet actually >.> GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME!

Bi-Weekly or Monthly (voted monthly)... If you do it too often it gets old. If you do it too infrequently, people forget.

1-3 hours seems short ... It seems like the 2 hour contest got a bunch of late/unfinished/buggy submissions (based on posts I scanned over ). A whole day seems too long, too (reasons have been posted already-- procrastination).

12 hours gives you a lot of time to work on it/debug it, and assuming people don't work on it for the full time (unless they are over-achievers, which is laughable to even think about map makers like that ) it gives a wider range for different timezones. ... Though it may still be too much.

... And after my thinking aloud, 3 to 5 hours seems good. I'll say 3 (2 hours to make it, an hour to debug it maybe?)

EDIT:
... Though I often forget that an hour may be a long time to wait, it is a very short time when you are actually doing something. ;o (Hell, a week is a very short period of time. ;o)

EDIT:
Psh. Think of that in the time leading up to the contest start time.

How about we agree on some frequency now and make make the length of the contests vary between the most popular selections? Say bi-weekly, with 2, 3 and 4 hour contests circulating?

How about changing the time every contest? We could do 30 minutes one month, then 4 hours, then 2 hours and then 1 day, etc.

bi-weekly?

Why do you guys want it twice a week? I voted weekly and 2 hours. I think it gives enough time to make a fun little creative map.

As a side note, why do people keep mentioning voting? The point of these contests isn't to win, it's to see what you can do in a limited amount of time. If you finish, congratulations.

Ideally nobody should ever ever finish within the time limit. 'Finished' implies that some testing/debugging and maybe even a little polishing has occurred. That's the sort of thing you can work on later.
The primary goal is to make a playable map as quickly as possible, but if you have, say, three hours to make a map, you don't necessarily want to make something super simple and work on small details the whole time. Your map design should be ambitious enough to completely fill the allotted time.
A longer time limit should translate into 'more complex maps' rather than 'more finished maps'.

Bi-weekly is every two weeks.

I realized the 2 hour mapping contest went too fast and some people didn't even finish till 3 and even 4 hours. I voted for 24 hours btw because it allows for a reasonable map that can actually be interesting instead of some really small minigame or run n' gun.

*also voted bi-weekly

Here's a novel idea; run it the same way the terrain competitions of old back in '09 were run.
Someone will start the contest, specify the amount of time alloted in the first post and post any special rules (ie. a theme or something). Of course, specify when the contest will begin. Then after everyone has submitted their maps, a judging topic will select the winner of that round, who can then host the next contest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just look back a few pages in the terrain forum and look for COMPETITION ROUND ##.

That again implies that there is a winner and completely defeats the purpose. You might as well just bring back the monthly contests if that were the case.

Who won the 2 hour contest we had last sunday?

Okay, then instead of the winner of the contest hosting the next round, a designated host will host for 3 or 4 rounds, then a new host will be elected; host candidates must say so.

Aha! That would clear up much confusion >.>

I've hosted one and two hour contests spontaneously many times in the past, though this recent one was the first in a long time. For someone like me it's an excellent chance to put a concept to fruition (like Harm Detection, and Five Triggers).

As for the time limit- while a day is good for allowing people in many different time zones to compete, it also causes the maps to have a very wide window of time spent of them. Part of the beauty of just a few hours to work on it is that it is a much greater race to see who can produce the best content in the allotted time. On the other hand, essentially every map turned in for a day long contest will inevitably have an "I only worked X hours on it" annexed to it. Even more crucial to me is the adrenaline involved when trying to work at full speed for a couple hours. I hadn't eaten dinner so quickly in a long time until Sunday's contest.

I think 4 hours could be short enough to keep it exciting while long enough for most people to produce something that doesn't suck.

I don't think time zones are a problem. Because the only stricture of the contest is the time limit imposed on mapping, there is no reason why it could not be done asynchronously. American members can meet in a the designated channel at one appointed time while European members can meet at a different, more reasonable time. At the end of each session, everyone would simply post their maps in the main challenge thread for that week. If yall think organizers are a good idea, there can be a separate organizer on either side of the pond. Having everyone in a channel is appealing because of the communal feeling, but I do not view it as a requirement to holding such an event. Therefore, I do not see any real reason to have a 24 hour challenge. The nature of the 'challenge' is compromised more that way, in my opinion.