One great request that contest holders sometimes have is the ability to hold private contests that don't get indexed by search engines or that only certain individuals can participate in. We have made a giant leap in that direction and are currently working the last few issues out with this ability.


When people start new threads in the contest forums, they will notice an option for making the thread private (below the message area). The easiest way to make a thread visible to only GFXcontests.com members is to select the option "Only selected usergroups" in the private threads options and then enter "Registered Users" to the private threads options text field.

In the near future, the ability to create private threads will be a premium option that will only be available via a subscription fee.

We encourage people to play with this feature but to be aware that for right now it is a "beta" feature and a great deal of testing needs to be done to make sure it doesn't accidently expose private threads to the wrong eyes.

One down side to private threads is that they will NOT be visible in RSS feeds so this might slow down responses to private contests by designers who rely on RSS feeds to learn about new contests.