A public statement and explanation of what I did with the contest.

[Jack Riguel]

yikes, if i ever go to court, my worst nightmare would be Booj as my opponents attourney....
well handled mate

Site admins can be scary things... experienced ones even more-so.

 

[Artesia]

Guys, I know now of a bias against me; with that said, my community now feels our votes don't count. Everyone is congratulating A Boojum Snark, but remember that this was a private message to him. It was made public. To judge someone on what they do, as I've been done here, would be unjust. We now feel our votes didn't count due to the fact you feel our votes did not reflect our opinion. With this said, you guys posting our anger posts after making our votes mean nothing is laughable. We tried to voice our opinion in this contest and bring traffic to this community, and for that we were judged. It is sad that the contest was done this way and it shouldn't have been made public with such a flawed system.

If the contest was meant to simply get people to log into the site, we would have simply made a contest where people would "vote" for the person who refered them to the site, and award the person with the most referals a prize and leave maps out of the equation completely, but as this isn't a popularity contest, or a recruiting contest, as has been said numerous times, mass voting for a friend is against the spirit of the contest, and the spirit of this community. TDK can be proud of how many votes his entry got, despite the fact that biased votes were removed and he didn't win. Look how many entries didn't get a vote.

The system may be "flawed" to some degree, the community is still evolving. It would be virtually impossible to have a perfect system, beyond doing blind panel voting where X number of people are chosen from active members of the community to vote on maps, that have been renamed numbers rather than names by 1 individual. In addition, posting or sharing previews of entries would be prohibited, (judges would disqualify) as to prevent adding bias to the judges. Judges would be allowed to enter, but couldn't rate their own entry, and shouldn't know who did what entry (according to previous points)


EDIT: What about a blind public vote? threads and posts disallowed. No screenshots given to voters, all map names given a random number after being entered.

There will always be a way for dishonest individuals to try and cheat the system as long as the vote remains public. A contestant could always load such a map pack, see which one is his, then tell all his friends

The only way I can see that one working better than described, would be to compile several packs, each with a different number scheme for the map, and randomly redirecting the downloads to the different packs, and tracking who downloaded which pack. Then reorganizing the votes based on which pack each person downloaded, which could be easily done in excel. The only thing is, I'm not a web guy, so I'm not sure if random files, with tracking is possible.

 

[BrokenTripod]

Yeah, but in the end you could still just take a screenshot and show it to everyone and tell them to vote for yours. It would take longer, so it would discourage "Oh, this vote will only take a few seconds of your time!"

It would also give people a chance to actually LOOK at the other entries instead of just blindly looking for a name.

I honestly doubt that all the people that were referred to the site looked at all the entries, because they were told to vote for a particular person, and that means they weren't voting based on their own opinions, but the opinion of the person who linked them.

Yeah.

 

[Psy]

Keep the entries nameless?

 

[Terr]

Keeping them anonymous seems impractical, especially with longer-term contests where author feedback is important.

I'd suggest:

• Lock the poll thread so nobody voting will directly see other people saying "So-and-so's was awesome!")
• Only votes from users who have been registered before the contest started.
• Hide the results of the contest until it is over.
• Randomize the order of the choices shown.

 

[TheBigD]

Keeping them anonymous seems impractical, especially with longer-term contests where author feedback is important.

I'd suggest:

• Lock the poll thread so nobody voting will directly see other people saying "So-and-so's was awesome!")
• Only votes from users who have been registered before the contest started.
• Hide the results of the contest until it is over.
• Randomize the order of the choices shown.

I think you hit it. The only change I'd proffer is to shorten the required registration time to one week before the voting begins. A lot of people can register in the time between when a contest is announced and when voting begins.

 

[Chaopsychochick]

Actually keeping the entires anonymous would work out great I think because the authors can still get feedback without there being any bias in the feedback. It would be easy enough to let authors know which number is theirs and ask them to keep quiet about it. Then when people give feedback about the certain numbers they can read that and get feedback.

Though there does definitely need to be an overhaul of how the voting/rating/contests are handled as from personal observation there seem to be a good number of issues that have arisen from this one.

 

[Lord Ned]

Keep the entries nameless?

Error! Untitled.bsp already exists. Overrite? Y/N

 

[eerieone]

_you would need to have an admin-only thread for the submissions (authors would request autherization for posting their entries)

_contestants would get an anonymous number (swamp001.vmf - swampXXX.vmf)

_every contestant would post several screenshots, for if the number of entries exceeds 15+ , otherwise the voting should be based on loading up the maps and inspecting them (15 is a tolerable number)

_many entries, such as mine, receive so many votes, because they were submitted early and they are associated with the swamp them

_releasing all entries+screenshots all at the same time would even the playfield and work towards a more fair vote

_1..2..3.. Points you can distribute between your favorites wouldn´t polarize the entries, hence encourage fresh mappers to submit

_10 prior post minimum to vote to exclute votefaking

_no jury vote, i very well appreciate it in the annual contest, but in "small" detailing contests it wouldn´t fit

this would require a far more intenisve care from the admins, i´m well aware of that
@all admins: you´re doing an awesome job as it is, best guarded community i´ve ever been involved with


i´d see that as the best solution (open to suggestions of course)
feel free to curse, flame, but most important of all...... suggest improvements!!!

(p.s. drunk on wine and perfect ukrainian vodka.... so, feel free to critize me.... i´ll read it when i sober up )

 

[Dr. Spud]

_every contestant would post several screenshots, for if the number of entries exceeds 15+ , otherwise the voting should be based on loading up the maps and inspecting them (15 is a tolerable number)

I probably won't bother downloading and running more than like... 5 or 6 maps. It's kind of a bitch TBH.

edit: That's only partly because I'm lazy. It's also because in the back of my mind I know most people aren't going to load up each map either.

 

[Armadillo of Doom]

Site admins can be scary things... experienced ones even more-so.

Just be thankful that you haven't seen me get my rage on When I am calm, you know you're in trouble, lol. On a serious note, I really like all of the suggestions thus far. I have in fact been reading everything, and I think you guys have the right idea. Our next mini-contest will definitely require some stricter and/or better-stated rules.

 

[Wegason]

Well I loaded up every single map but did it in stints of 15 at a time. 15 would be the high limit for me, 10-12 would be a better fit.

If people were to vote 1-2-3 for their best from five or six screenshots, which were not defined to a user, and then the top ten were put into a pack to download and look through, that should even out the contest and make it fairer for all, as well as meaning that more people got votes or points so to speak.