On Wednesday, 5/20, the forums will be offline for about an hour starting at 1 pm MST for maintenance.

Nothing exciting, no new features or functionality. Just some routine stuff that needs to be done. I’ll keep iStockScoop updated when we are back online. You can also follow on twitter:

http://twitter.com/istock

All year long, designers pit their skills against each other in the iStock Steel Cage. If you don’t know the drill, it’s simple: a contender creates an original design. Their opponent takes the Photoshop® file and changes it, combining the existing elements with new images to create something new. Whoever creates the most impressive, original, eye-popping artwork wins.

Every year, we bring together our seasoned Cage veterans, along with some hungry newcomers, for a marathon tournament: the Battle Royale. It’s a gruelling schedule, full of late nights and countless hours tweaking layer masks and lighting effects. It isn’t for the faint of heart.

Last year, 117 iStockers entered the Steel Cage and endured an 85 Day ordeal. In the end, it came down to 2 designers, and nbodine walked away with the prize: Five grand.

This year it can be you. Enter Battle Royale IV on May 28th and you could win $5000 on Punctum Day.  

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After a long time in development and several months of internal testing, we’re happy to present our new default search sort: Best Match 2.0.

The algorithm takes many factors into account. One of these, keyword relevance, rates the importance of keywords in the files. Files can have up to 50 keywords, but normally only a few of those keywords describe the primary subject or concept. 

If you open your advanced search tab, you’ll see a new slider up in the top right corner, underneath the sort options. This lets you tweak your best match sort. 

Setting the best match sort slider to “high” causes the search engine to prioritize files with those primary subject keywords.

Setting the best match sort slider to “low” gives more prominence to the other factors (similar to the old Best Match).

The default position is right in the middle. It will stay wherever you set it from session to session, so after you’ve logged in and out, you’ll still have the same setting you last used.

But does it work?
Yes. Yes it does.

Okay, go into your advanced search tab, and pull your slider all the way to the left. This is going to give you a very best-match heavy ranking. Now search for cheese.

You’re going to see a lot of really good looking files, with quite a few flames up on the top. All these files have cheese in them, sure, but cheese isn’t necessarily the focus. You’ve got a lot of cheeseburgers, pizzas, and food icon sets.

Now, pull the slider into the middle and search for cheese again.
See the difference? There’s still some pizza and a few burgers, but suddenly there are a lot of isolated pieces of, well, cheese. You’ve got edam, swiss, and cheddar, all by themselves. 

If you pull it all the way to the right for a mainly keyword-relevance weighted sort, you’ll get even more images of just cheese. 

You can tweak the slider depending on your particular search. It’s like a sort within a sort, and it gives you a really great way of refining your results around a particular keyword. A “high” slider position is good for finding exactly what you want. A “low” slider position is good for brain-storming: you’ll get a variety of good files.

For our clients, we’re really excited to be giving you this customization option. At the end of the day, it’s all about giving you the best possible results when you search. And the best way to do that is to give you as much control as possible over what you see.

For our contributors, we hope that by increasing the number of best match combinations out there, it will mean more of your files are seen and downloaded.

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This is scheduled to go live today (July 7) tomorrow (July 8).

“We’ve tried to make everything quicker and easier. Now when you hit the login button, you’ll get a login box pop up that won’t navigate you away from your current page. You’ll also be able to use either your member name or email address to login.”

Forums - Discussion - Front Page Blog: New login and sign up process | iStockphoto.com