I'm not going to even argue anymore. I thought this would be a fun way to show off your creative sides (regardless if it was in Mario Paint or Photoshop cs3) and allow me to reward both new and loyal members alike for their inspirations. I thought letting the community vote for their favorite instead of mine would be fun and involving too... looks like it all backfired on me, shame on me I guess. There's just too much greed and spite spewing from this unfortunately.

We wont having photo editing contests anymore.

:-(

week will continue and we'll still have contests, we'll just have to figure out how to go about them ;-)

If you guy want to keep doing the picture thing we can... do you want me to pick my favorite or some alternative to the current voting system? Let me know what yall come up with.

For the voting, so it isn't a "popularity contest", how about all submissions are emailed to you, instead of posted by the respective authors.  You can then post them and not name the author.  Have people vote for their favorite without knowing who made which (and anyone who posts telling their picture would be disqualified) it would be completely objective, and based on the author's creativity, not who they are.

As for people without photoshop, who have to use paint... just acquire photoshop the same way I can just about guarantee everyone who used it in this thread acquired it.  It's not that hard.  As for "every contest is a photo editing contest" 2 out of 3 isn't every contest.  The first one was a caption contest, not a photo editing contest.  If you want to change the last 2 contests to something else, go for it, but stick with making people at least earn it.  It's a contest, not a giveaway.

but think about this: millions of people worldwide have computers. many have the same wireless networks. it's pretty freaking hard to trace to one computer when virtually everyone is doing it. take ISOhunt and Limewire, they are basically the same, download something for free....yet, Limewire has Pro, and Isohunt has...what was it? something like 600 terabytes?

I do download some things, *DS*games*cough, but I will end up spending money on the games at the end of the day. As far as illegally acquired programs or cracked pc games I do not partake in. Even just downloading those types of files through a file uploading site you can still be caught, and actually I know a person that got in trouble from there.