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We hope you have all been enjoying Season 17 of the Steemit Engagement Challenge which is coming to an end shortly. Season 18 of the Challenge will be starting towards the end of May. Applications are now invited from communities for the new season. For this 18th round we are looking for five Communities who would like to take part alongside the Steemit Crypto Academy. --- --- ### How Communities can Apply

For Season 18 of the Engagement Challenge, we are looking for **five** Communities to participate. The Communities should be well established, with a good, active team of Admins and Mods, a growing community curation account, and an ongoing practice of active moderation of posts in their community. Communities chosen for the Challenge will be expected to run weekly contests through their community account, and also be willing to check and comment on all posts in their community. To apply to join the Challenge, the Community should make an application post including… * the purpose of their community * a brief history of their community * a list of all Founders, Administrators, and Moderators * details of their community curation account, how it is being built up, and who holds the Master, Owner and Active keys * details of the community’s current policy for checking and commenting on posts * details of how the community helps members improve the quality of their posts. **We are particularly looking for Communities who can offer creative, interesting and inspiring Challenges. To demonstrate this, Communities should include in their application three example challenges that they will use if they are selected.** The post should also contain the contact details (Telegram/Discord) of at least 2 lead people in the community team. **Posts should be submitted by 11:59 pm UTC, on Wednesday, May 15th, 2024.** The application posts should be made on the community account and include the tag #engagementapplication in the first four tags. The Communities selected for previous seasons are welcome to apply again for Season 18. --- --- ### Checking & Grading Posts

The Communities selected for Season 18 should ensure they promptly check and comment on all posts for their weekly contests. The minimum they should check for are #club status, Steem exclusivity, plagiarism, AI content generation and bot use. To help @steemcurator01 and @steemcurator02 to curate the contest posts more effectively we have been looking for community Mods to use a clear, simple, and easy-to-read comment format. Communities are free to design their own comment formats but it is ideal if all Mods in a particular community use a common, standard format. Remember though - votes are not guaranteed. --- --- ### Community Beneficiaries

**Please note that the selected communities should not make setting a beneficiary to any related community account obligatory for anyone to enter the Challenge contests.** --- --- ### Selection of Challenge Winners

Each week we would like all 6 Challenge communities to make a post on their community account announcing the **three** people who have demonstrated the best engagement in their weekly contest through the quality of both their contest post and their comments on other people’s contest posts. We will leave it to each community to decide how they select their weekly winners, but they should include in their announcement posts a brief summary of their selection process. **All the weekly winners, as well as the community announcement posts, will receive extra prize votes from @steemcurator01.** --- The weekly contest announcement posts and the weekly winners announcement posts are rewarded with substantial votes from @steemcurator01. **Communities now have the option to set beneficiaries on those weekly posts to share the rewards with their Admins and Moderators who are curating and commenting on the entry posts.** --- --- We are looking forward to reading all your applications. This is an exciting Challenge to help build engagement on the platform. We hope as many people as possible will take part. Thank you _The Steemit Team_