Suggesting New Rules For Contests

[Vela Nanashi]

The problem with the built in polls is that there are limits to what can be done to them, an extension could implement a separate polling system, and we could make those features work maybe, even keeping it visible on front page. If I do that I might be able to add exclusion rule to the poll itself so we can say who can't vote in the poll at all, or maybe just not for their own option. I can't promise quick work here, I currently lack a testing environment but I may be able to set one up on the server in a way it can't break things for users.

[Shocker]

The problem with the built in polls is that there are limits to what can be done to them, an extension could implement a separate polling system, and we could make those features work maybe, even keeping it visible on front page. If I do that I might be able to add exclusion rule to the poll itself so we can say who can't vote in the poll at all, or maybe just not for their own option. I can't promise quick work here, I currently lack a testing environment but I may be able to set one up on the server in a way it can't break things for users.

@Vela Nanashi I think right now we are more at the stage of having a frank discussion about it than having to implement something right away. That’s at least how I see my posts in this discussion.

[LtBroccoli]

@Lucius let me play devil’s advocate here for the moment. It’s concerning the ban of voting for yourself. I do like voting for the best story in any given contest, or at least the one I consider the best, if that is my story, this would mean I’m not voting at all in a contest with the proposed ban on voting for my own story.

I do think it’s fair to say that our active authors are among the most active participants in voting for contests as well. So we would potentially reduce visible participation.

There's a risk of that, as in not wanting to vote for the second best story -- or, indeed, for one's competitors as such. It seems acceptable to me, but I may well be wrong, to be proved so by the very first 'don't-DIY' contest.

This is why I'm against banning voting for yourself. NGL, I've voted for myself under three situations.

1-I think my story is the best in the contest and voting for second best would be lying and hurting me.
2-The person who wrote the best story pissed me off and I refused to vote for them.
3-I'm the only person who voted for me.

When we have enough entries to justify voting for two stories, voting for yourself is almost expected. Especially if you think your story is the best.

Aside from those, I have a couple other suggestions. I don't want to call them rules, but more like a code of conduct.

Everyone voting makes an honest effort to read every story before voting.
Competitors are encouraged to rate and comment on the other stories in the contest.
AI usage should be declared in the notes/warnings/disclosures section. However much you use it, say so. Even if it's just using ChatGPT or Claude as a search engine because Google is fundamentally broken.
Contest stories may be put through an AI detector. If it flags past a certain percentage like 70 or 80%, it will get the AI tag. The author can contest it if they feel it's a false positive. It happens from time to time.

[Claire]

Everyone voting makes an honest effort to read every story before voting.

You can write that down, but it will not change anything. The truth is, half of the contestants can't even be bothered to take the 3 minutes to read the contest thread in full and then blame the contest organizer for their inability to read. The casual reader voting in the contest won't even notice that it says somewhere in the contest thread that they are expected to read all stories before voting.

If you want that, I would suggest to have a jury based contest. 3 or 5 jurors get to read all contest stories. The stories are anonymized. And the jurors are meant to evaluate the story based on a predefined set of criteria.

But what you want is not compatible with a popularity vote.

Competitors are encouraged to rate and comment on the other stories in the contest.

That already exists. It is just being ignored.

Contest stories may be put through an AI detector.

You'd have to specify which one. Many of the free ones produce a lot of false positives.

I can also tell you that on Literotica rejections of stories for being AI is causing a lot of drama there. People are not happy that their stories are getting falsely flagged as AI. So prepare yourself for many exhausting complaints from authors, justified and unjustified, that the mods and admins will have to deal with.

[RapeU]

I don't think we need to create new rules and should keep things going as is.

Without getting into the finer details, so far poll vote tampering and story rating tampering has been the result of two people making multiple accounts. The first known incident was discovered relatively quickly by @Claire who immediately banned the offending accounts that just gave each other reputation so they could unlock Record Chaser.

The incident with @LaLia was discovered because there was concern of last minute voting in the Party Hard! contest, which ended up being legitimate user votes. That lead to us paying attention while voting was going on in the "You" story contest. Which lead us down a significant rabbit hole of multiple sock puppet accounts @LaLia has used for a long period of time (which we again won't go into specific detail of) to personally vote and rate her own stories.

The only thing that needs to change is moderator involvement in story contests. We did a good job spotting the illegitimate behavior during this last contest. We just need to keep an eye out for that kind of behavior moving forward.

[Blue]

So, I’d like to weigh in on this as well. After all, I’m one of the people who were eliminated from a competition because of LaLia’s fake accounts.
Up to now, I’ve avoided voting for my own story, even though I personally considered it better than my opponent’s. And that’s how I intend to keep doing things.
However, what I find completely unacceptable is creating fake accounts to vote for one’s own story. That has nothing to do with fairness or an appreciation of a story’s quality.

[Vela Nanashi]

Yeah fake or sock puppet accounts are definitely not allowed, and are bad, and sadly pathetic too. All that said it is not super easy to notice them, but we definitely have our eyes open to it now.