Is Hinting no longer done?

[Joerpm]

I've been away (again) from the challenge for a while and I noticed that the "Throw A Brick" section is still around, but I don't see the "Hinting Time" anymore. Is hinting not done anymore?

[Shann]

Yeah they did away with hinting when they hired professional editors to judge the stories (or about that time) These judges get the results back fairly fast so it was decided to just jump into brick-throwing which can be given the all-clear from as early as Friday night to Monday afternoon. On the Faithwriters page on facebook, Deb usually announces w the all clear.

[Joerpm]

Well darn. The hinting part was one of my favorite things about the challenge. Not in coming up with a hint for my piece, but in reading the clever hints everyone else came up with and then trying to find their entry from the hint.

Oh well, I guess everything can't go on forever...at least we still have the challenge.

[Deb Porter]

Joe, Shann got that a little wrong. Hinting wasn't done away with when we brought in the editors (which was near three years ago). It was after we tried to run the Challenge over two weeks instead of one (back in October-December 2011) to lighten the workload. When that didn't go over well, and we brought it back as weekly (a year ago), we decided to go straight to brick throwing once the judges have their winners (to just cut out that one extra step with hinting).

Although the task of posting for hinting time and then brick throwing was not a huge thing, it was a problem when the judging (or finalizing) was taking a bit longer than expected. Delays do happen now and then, so going straight to brick throwing just simplified things generally.

But we definitely still have brick throwing, and that's happening for FLAT right now:

http://bit.ly/UYawZj

Love, Deb