Suggesting New Rules For Contests

[Claire]

I wanted to create this topic anyway, but given how the recent You-contest ended, I think it has become more urgent now.

In the recent You-contest, we had our first confirmed case of a contestant manipulating the contest in their favor by creating sockpuppet accounts to increase both the vote count of their story and the rating of their story. We also believe that they created sockpuppets accounts prior to that which have manipulated contests and story ratings in their favor for close to a year at this point.

The truth is, we likely wouldn't have noticed the manipulation of the You-contest if during the prior Party-Hard-contest we hadn't seen a sudden influx of last day votes for @Shocker's story, making his story overtake @MisterZ's story close to the end. @MisterZ's story had a lead in votes for most of the voting window.

Before any speculation arises, let me be clear: We looked into those last minute votes for the Party-Hard-contest and they looked legitimate to us. We are very sure that @Shocker didn't manipulate the contest in his favor. I can tell you for a fact that I know that he lost a contest here in the past because he refused to vote for his own story and voted for one of his opponents' stories, while the contestant he lost against voted for their own story. If he had voted for his own story, he would have won the contest. So I'm vouching for @Shocker's integrity here.

The point is that this event made us more aware of users registering last minute for the sole purpose of voting in a contest. If we weren't sensitive to that happening, we might not have checked on the sockpuppet accounts that were used to manipulate the You-contest.

I would now like to make two suggestions for future contests. One is to add a technical limitation to prevent manipulation like we've seen it for the You-contest. The other is a minor rule change. And I would like to know especially what regular participants in our contests think about these.


1) We can deactivate certain features of the board for new users. For example, a new user needs to get posts approved by a moderator or admin several times before they can post without approval. That is essentially an anti-spam measure. If that restriction didn't exist, you would have seen quite a bit of scam-advertisement on the board already. We could very easily say: Users with less than the approved posts can't vote in polls in the Book Club, which is where the contest polls are created. However, that would take away the ability to vote even for users with fairly old accounts who don't have that number of posts. I suspect that this might reduce the number of votes we see in a contest significantly.

My preferred alternative is this: We could make it so that a newly registered user can't vote in polls in the Book Club until their account is one day old. If you think one day is too little, we can increase that 2 or 3 days. But we can only change that in increments of full days, so 12 or 36 hours is not possible. A new user could still post, rate, and vote in polls outside the Book Club, etc. The only added restriction for them would be that they'd have to wait one day before they can vote. That would have prevented the two sockpuppets created on the last day of the You-contest from interfering with the contest poll.

This does of course have consequences beyond that. If a user truly feels inspired to register because they want to vote in a contest, they can't do that immediately. Even if they register 5 days before the end of the voting deadline, a new user returning 24 hours after registration is not guaranteed, especially if the inability to vote might have frustrated them. So, we might lose some legitimate votes because of that as well. Likely not as many as with the posts rule, but still a few.

Also, someone dedicated to manipulating a poll can create sockpuppets in advance. What this rule stops are impulsive "Well, I'm missing just one vote. I could create another account..."-decisions.

Personally, I like this adjustment because I think the negative effects will be minimal, but I'm curious to hear what you think.

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2) I would like to propose a rule for contests that says something along the lines of:

"Voting for your own story is not allowed. If you vote for your own story by accident - misclicks do happen - please tell us immediately and there will be no consequences. Should we find that you voted for your own story AFTER the contest is over, your story will be disqualified."

Why do I think that makes sense? I already mentioned the example of @Shocker losing a contest because he and his opponent had different ideas of sportsmanship regarding voting for themselves. If contests here ended with poll results like 115 to 87, authors voting for themselves wouldn't matter. But since our contests are quite likely to have results like 9 to 8, one vote has a tremendous effect. For example, in the Kristen's Board contest, I didn't vote for myself. If I had done that, my story would have had 6 instead 5 votes and that would have moved it from shared 4th place with @Vile8r to shared 2nd place with @Vela Nanashi and @Shocker.

Some might think that voting for yourself is just normal and everybody should do it, then everything is fair. Others will feel icky at the thought of voting for themselves. You can of course say to leave that to everybody for themselves to decide, but then we do strongly favor those willing to vote for themselves. Also, you create this dynamic where even people who don't want to vote for themselves might feel the need to do so to level the playing field.

By forbidding voting for yourself, we get rid of all that ambiguity and will have overall fairer contests.

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These are my two suggestions to make contests more fair/secure. Let me know what you think, especially as contestants yourself.

[Vela Nanashi]

I think this is a benefit we get if we do all votinh i contests by rating, not only is it possible for moderators to see the votes and if needed delete votes from sock puppets, but also the rating system prevents rating your own story.

For checking votes on normal polls it requires messing about in the database right now. Sure the rule to not allow voting for your own story is fine, but it does require someone with database access to verify that presently, sure I might integrate better checking into moderatpr and administrator pages, so checking this can be done easier.

Personally the time delay feels minimal to me even if we make it a week or more. I would prefer only members who actually participate on the forum get to vote though, several posts is not hard to do. I am not sure why we should care what people who can't do at least that little think. But I suppose I am extreme there.

I feel like best solution is to use rating system for votes, it also gives us more popular and hopefully community favourite stories, and can already be monitored by all mods and admins.

[RapeU]

I’ll post thoughts later, but we need to keep the number of posts needed for the anti spam feature vague. I’ve edited out the specific number. I know newer users know the number, but please don’t reveal it. The whole point is to have us see the spam first so none of you have to.

[Shocker]

Perhaps a couple of clarifying remarks from my side, nobody was more surprised than myself on the sudden influx of votes for my story and ultimately getting a win.

Claire said I refused to vote for my own story and the story I voted for won by one vote. To be quite frank I voted for the in my better story, and it won so no hard feelings there, I have been voting for my own stories as well when I thought they were the better story.

I’m not a huge fan of the determination of a result based on ratings. I like to give authors who put their real effort into their stories full credit and recognition for it. If I have to consider a ranking due to contest, I feel that isn’t providing the proper encouragement to keep writing. Also I had feeling that some ratings are applied tactically, after comparing standings.

Now to address @Claire’s suggestions. I think I’m leaning a bit more towards the 24h acclimatizing period, it takes the extra workload of the admins, and it is a clear rule that can be communicated to new users.

Perhaps another option would be of not displaying the current standing of the voting. Registered users can’t see the results until they have voted, but as long as one isn’t logged in the current results are fully visible.

Alternatively it might be possible to display who has actually cast their vote, true it can look a bit embarrassing to show the world that the one vote my story got was cast by me, but there have been a couple of occasions were I would have loved to know who has voted for me despite other more excellent stories. If only to thank them and learn what they did like.

[Lucius]

1) Users with less than the approved posts can't vote in polls in the Book Club, which is where the contest polls are created. However, that would take away the ability to vote even for users with fairly old accounts who don't have that number of posts. I suspect that this might reduce the number of votes we see in a contest significantly.

It's going to depress participation, so 'no' on that.

My preferred alternative is this: We could make it so that a newly registered user can't vote in polls in the Book Club until their account is one day old. If you think one day is too little, we can increase that 2 or 3 days. ... Personally, I like this adjustment because I think the negative effects will be minimal, but I'm curious to hear what you think.

'Fresh' accounts can rate stories and vote in points-based contests too, and I'd absolutely hate to exclude them -- it's what we very much want from users, after all! But I can't think of an intellectual justification for depriving newbies of voting power while leaving them the ability to rate community contests' stories etc.

@Vela Nanashi We can hide polls from guests as @Shocker proposes, can't we?

By forbidding voting for yourself, we get rid of all that ambiguity and will have overall fairer contests.

Yes, like I've always accepted this disadvantage and it's not a problem, but it's fairer that way.

Perhaps another option would be of not displaying the current standing of the voting. Registered users can’t see the results until they have voted, but as long as one isn’t logged in the current results are fully visible.

Alternatively it might be possible to display who has actually cast their vote, true it can look a bit embarrassing to show the world that the one vote my story got was cast by me, but there have been a couple of occasions were I would have loved to know who has voted for me despite other more excellent stories. If only to thank them and learn what they did like.

Secrecy or transparency, hmmm... I think the second is easier to implement. What do others think?

[Shocker]

Edit: screwed up post

[Shocker]

@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.

Seeing the bars racing each other, is certainly exciting, but it can lead to the desire of giving your story an extra push. Not knowing where one is standing until the end could cut down on that temptation. Much better would be even if at the moment of voting they see the result to note that their vote was correctly registered, but no love updates.

[Claire]

@Shocker PhpBB, our forum software, doesn't allow to hide the current standings of the poll. And even as a registered user who hasn't voted yet you can see them if you click on the link... below the poll I think. There exists an extension we could use to add that feature plus a few other features like weighted voting. But that extension is not compatible with another extension we use: polls on index.

It was always my personal value judgment that I valued the promotional effect for the contest of having the poll visible on the index page over the ability to hide the current standings. @Vela Nanashi looked briefly into trying to make these two extensions compatible and that is still something I would like to see. But it wasn't something that was easily done by adjusting just a line of code or two.

but in principle I agree with you. I would love to hide the current standings until the end of the poll.

[Lucius]

@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.

[Vile8r]

I liked Claire's second option for dealing with sockpuppet accounts. Many other sites I have been on did that, for the first 24 or 48 hours, when you were a new member, you couldn't post. I see nothing wrong with that .