The preliminary rounds system of our community challenges is flawed.   Anyone with enough time on their hands can go around and like and comment on everyone else's challenge articles and get 50-60 likes in return. I mean all you have to do is look at the number of like shortlist articles got in the plant challenge compared to challenges before that. Although supporting other community members is fine, I think that this like mining exploits the kindness of our community for personal gain.   I propose a different system, what if the platform kept a running list of all the most-liked submissions as it does during Worldember, then the top ten people on this list would be barred from liking other submissions to the current challenge. This would also fix the issue of only people on the Discord server being able to see the shortlist.   All and all I think that the like-based system of shortlisting needs some work and gives lots of power to those this the time and the attention span to give not-so-sincere feedback on everyone's articles.   If anyone has other ideas about how to fix this you can contact me a [email protected]