I don't understand why my ranking/points has gone down - there must be a mistake

We often get emailed by people asking if we can check their leaderboard results, because they had some good results this week but their leaderboard ranking or points have gone down, and they're confused and usually a bit disappointed too.

The quickest way for you to understandexactly what has happened with your Leaderboard ranking is to check out the Your Rankings page. Here you'll see which images have counted towards your current and recent Leaderboard position.

- if your points have gone down then it's usually because other good results that you had 13 weeks ago have just fallen out of contention this week (as only the last 12 weeks of results count). So despite doing well in the last week you actually did a bit better 13 weeks ago.

- if your ranking points have gone UP, but your rank has gone DOWN... This is simply because others around you have scored more points in the past week. This can happen in particular when a few big contests release their results, and lots of photographers will receive a lot of points from them.  It is also therefore possible to have fewer ranking points from one week to the next, but to go up the ranking, but we don't get emailed about that one so often ;)

- you might have done really well in a contest that week (even won it!) but it may not be a contest that scores too many points. For example if you won the crowd vote in a Community Contest of 400 images that would actually not score many points (because it's a community contest with fewer entries and you didn't get a judge placing) in relation to having an image come for example in 10th place in the crowd vote and get a judge commendation in a premium contest with 3000 entries.

- finally, it's worth remembering that an image can only have its BEST score from a contest in the past 12 weeks count towards your ranking at any one time. So you maye have had 2 great contest results with the same image, but only the one that scored the highest ranking points will count.