To vote on a competition entry, like it. A public vote is a like, and an entry's vote count is the number of people who have liked it. The heart on the entry is the vote button.
How to vote
- Open the competition page.
- During the voting window a Vote Now button appears on it. If you cannot see it, voting has not opened yet or has already closed.
- Vote Now takes you to that competition's entries page, at uni.xyz/competitions/<competition-slug>/entries.
- Open an entry from that page and use the heart on it. The cards in the grid have no heart of their own, so the vote is placed on the entry's own page.
You vote on entries within one competition, so voting always starts from that competition. There is no separate global voting page.
You have to be signed in. Voting is tied to an account, which is what makes one person one vote possible. Anonymous visitors get a sign-in prompt instead of a vote.
One person one vote, and a second click takes it back
The heart is a toggle, not a counter. The first click is your vote. A second click removes it and the count goes down, so if a number dropped after you clicked, you have unvoted rather than voted twice. Clicking again votes once more. However many times you press it, one account is never counted more than once.
Voting only happens during the voting window
Public voting is a phase in a competition's timeline, not something available all the time. Every competition has a schedule of deadlines, and one of them is Public voting, with its own start and end. Outside that window the Vote Now button is not shown, which is the usual reason people cannot find it.
On recent competitions the window opens shortly after submissions close and runs for about a month, ending before results are announced. That is the usual shape rather than a rule, so read the competition's own timeline for the actual dates.
Liking is a normal feature of the site and is not switched off outside a voting window. What makes a like a vote in a competition is that it lands inside that competition's Public voting dates, and an entrant's own analytics can narrow the count to exactly that window.
Public votes and the jury are separate
The jury scores entries against the competition's published criteria. The competition leaderboard is grouped by award first and then by average jury score, and it can be re-sorted by jury score, community rating or likes.
Votes are not ignored, but they do not decide an award. The ranking an entrant sees on their own Analytics page is a Public Score, which combines all three signals: (Juror's Rating x 5) + (Project Score x 3) + (Likes x 0.2). Likes are counted in full, with no cap. Because a community rating is weighted five times a like, the most voted entry is not necessarily first, and is not necessarily the winner. What each leaderboard column means sets out the same formula.