Campaigning for votes

bullzeye.za said:
I'll nominate your thread if you'll nominate mine ;)
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New rule for all competitions: if you receive a PM or email requesting a nomination or vote solicitation, it must be reported to mods/admins prior to the close of the competition. Transgressors will have their forum accounts banned with immediate effect. Mybroadband reserves the right to financial recourse should a winner be selected who is subsequently discovered to have transgressed competition rules.

There is nothing that you can do to prevent a friend from nominating you, but you can make it incredibly onerous on anyone caught cheating, or caught trying to cheat...

You could also add 3 criteria to a comp like the above: posts/threads must meet the following criteria to be nominated: at least 100 words long; informative; accurate.

Then it doesn't actually matter if someone solicits a nomination from someone else. If it meets the criteria then so be it, it still counts. However if it turns out the nomination was secured from solicitation, account is banned, nomination/thread disqualified entirely, and if it is after the comp has ended, mybroadband reserve the right to demand return of all goods, or financial compensation for the value of the goods...
 
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DJ... said:
If I'm honest, none of the entries are really that informative, to me at least.

I think the judge thing might not be a bad idea.

How about this:

Anyone with a post-count of over 500 can nominate a post/thread for shortlisting (clone accounts sorted). OP cannot do so for his own thread or post. Multiple votes do not count - once it is nominated, additional nominations do not count (vote solicitation sorted). This can take place in a separate thread, and that way it will be clear if someone is just nominating a post/thread to help a buddy out - crowdsource it - let the forumites determine it (transparency and rule abiding). We can report posts that don't cut the muster (lower mod workload rather than trawling through looking for the best - mods can just deal with nominations that do not cut it in terms of comp rules).

Apply the random number generator to the final shortlist. Done.

Sorts out all of the mess, keeps things transparent, lowers mod workload, and is fair to everyone...
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It's a good idea, but perhaps a bit too ideal if you ask me.

First of all, it puts people like me out. I don't remember my post count, but I only really started posting a few weeks before the PS4 competition came out, yet I'm under 500 posts. Yet I've spent a large portion of my time contributing.

Secondly, friends will still vote for friends - we're all human. It's quite public that Killerbyte is my friend. Assuming he can vote, and he could nominate me, it would be invalid. However there are so many people (friends with, and) in favour of others, it would be next to impossible to spot the bias.

Letting forumites determine the short-list is a recipe for disaster. There are too many people who want to win and too many people who are bitter. We all know what went on in the voting threads. There would be more of that, more accusations and so on.

You're essentially limiting the pool of possible winner to those who have posted the most, and are the nicest at that point in time.

I'm not trying to plead my case here as it's quite safe to say I'm not a winner, it's purely and example, and why I think it should be purely moderators decisions.

I hope you understand that I'm not arguing with you, just explaining why I think that it possibly may not work from my point of view.
 
Go with MyGaming's rules ......... top 10/25 (going by mods) go into a draw, winner chosen using a RNG. Keep it simple.
 
mr_norris said:
It's a good idea, but perhaps a bit too ideal if you ask me.

First of all, it puts people like me out. I don't remember my post count, but I only really started posting a few weeks before the PS4 competition came out, yet I'm under 500 posts. Yet I've spent a large portion of my time contributing.
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You misunderstand - you can still be nominated. You however cannot nominate anyone else. Nominations are reserved for senior, contributing members of the forum, to eradicate the clones and trolls. As you have seen with this comp, you would have been nominated in any case...

mr_norris said:
Secondly, friends will still vote for friends - we're all human. It's quite public that Killerbyte is my friend. Assuming he can vote, and he could nominate me, it would be invalid. However there are so many people (friends with, and) in favour of others, it would be next to impossible to spot the bias.
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Only one nomination counts. It's no longer whoever has the most votes wins. If a nomination meets the criteria of the comp, and the nomination is sound, the nomination counts, even if it is from a friend. Makes no difference as long as the post/thread qualifies and no evidence exists of you directly soliciting votes. So killerbyte can still nominate you - no problems there...

Letting forumites determine the short-list is a recipe for disaster. There are too many people who want to win and too many people who are bitter. We all know what went on in the voting threads. There would be more of that, more accusations and so on.
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There's no voting in my example. Only a single nomination counts. Multiple nominations have no bearing on the outcome, and there are criteria for nominations that the transparency of a new thread will allow forumites to determine the validity thereof...

You're essentially limiting the pool of possible winner to those who have posted the most, and are the nicest at that point in time.
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Huh? No, I'm not. I think you're misunderstanding something here...

I'm not trying to plead my case here as it's quite safe to say I'm not a winner, it's purely and example, and why I think it should be purely moderators decisions.
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Mods have jobs and lives. They cannot sift through thousands of posts to score them all. That is just not a feasible idea...

I hope you understand that I'm not arguing with you, just explaining why I think that it possibly may not work from my point of view.
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But the voting aspect is gone in my scenario, and nominations are left to senior members of the forum who are in all likelihood not trolls and clones. Nominations will, for the most part, be very accurate representations of the content's validity, and those that don't pass the muster or appear to be friend-votes can be reported thanks to the transparency of it taking place in an open thread...
 
Mephisto_Helix said:
Go with MyGaming's rules ......... top 10/25 (going by mods) go into a draw, winner chosen using a RNG. Keep it simple.
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In this comp, for example, there were in excess of 4000 posts. How can mod go through that and score each one based on subjective criteria?
 
DJ... said:
In this comp, for example, there were in excess of 4000 posts. How can mod go through that and score each one based on subjective criteria?
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They already did that with the poll. The MyGaming way of scoring competitions is quite efficient imo.
 
cerebus said:
This can also work. In fact this is my preferred choice. And maybe 1 thread per username?
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I'd say have a separate sub-forum for competitions, and within there a subforum for nominations. Each nomination gets its own thread to make it easier for nominations to be discussed if necessary, and to collate. Nomination threads must conform with a template for forum name and content, making it simple to run a search to identify all valid entries...
 
cerebus said:
They already did that with the poll. The MyGaming way of scoring competitions is quite efficient imo.
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The poll is subject to vote solicitation which is the problem being highlighted here.

Why not remove the whole voting thing entirely and work on nominations?

I don't see the downside in my proposed solution...
 
DJ... said:
The poll is subject to vote solicitation which is the problem being highlighted here.

Why not remove the whole voting thing entirely and work on nominations?

I don't see the downside in my proposed solution...
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It's hella complicated.
 
DJ... said:
But the voting aspect is gone in my scenario, and nominations are left to senior members of the forum who are in all likelihood not trolls and clones. Nominations will, for the most part, be very accurate representations of the content's validity, and those that don't pass the muster or appear to be friend-votes can be reported thanks to the transparency of it taking place in an open thread...
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Most of your solution is pretty good, but nominating a thread I feel is still reduced to a popularity contest somewhat. There are some very good threads in this competition that have been relegated to the bottom of the pile because they have no, or very few, replies. The fact that they lack activity means that they tend to slip from people's radars, even senior members. Let's be honest - how many people here would have nominated a thread from (for example) the last 3 pages of the subforum?
 
Mike Hoxbig said:
Most of your solution is pretty good, but nominating a thread I feel is still reduced to a popularity contest somewhat. There are some very good threads in this competition that have been relegated to the bottom of the pile because they have no, or very few, replies. The fact that they lack activity means that they tend to slip from people's radars, even senior members. Let's be honest - how many people here would have nominated a thread from (for example) the last 3 pages of the subforum?
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I agree with you. I've read a few threads that were good, but did not have 1 reply.
 
cerebus said:
It's hella complicated.
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It's actually incredibly simple. I'll post a new thread about it where I explain how simple it actually is and we can discuss it...

Mike Hoxbig said:
Most of your solution is pretty good, but nominating a thread I feel is still reduced to a popularity contest somewhat. There are some very good threads in this competition that have been relegated to the bottom of the pile because they have no, or very few, replies. The fact that they lack activity means that they tend to slip from people's radars, even senior members. Let's be honest - how many people here would have nominated a thread from (for example) the last 3 pages of the subforum?
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Only one nomination is needed. It doesn't work on a vote system any longer. So even if a single person finds the post informative at the time (before it slips down the pages), it has been nominated. Simple, really, and quite fair imo...
 
DJ... said:
Here's a thread where we can discuss it. http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...itions-on-MyBroadband?p=12003630#post12003630

I did this so that it doesn't get lost in the abyss of a multi-page thread. I think it will work, and it is hardly as complicated as it sounds...
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I read your proposal, it is good to be tested and to receive the community end on the clockwork. Perhaps this competition can be rebooted or scraped (and the prize donated) since it is a mess which will be brought up in the next merit-based competition, but the only way to provide an adequate answer is to test the proposed solution.

However, the competition in question had been issued/motivated due to gather threads which might bring in views through search engines. The threads then in the competition sub-category must be moved back to its appropriate category, upon winning or elimination or their might be some interesting indexing (depending on the setup).
 
I got a PM asking me to vote, so I looked at the thread (which I otherwise would have missed) and applied my mind to what I thought the best thread was and voted accordingly. I teased the guy who sent me the PM about it but I hardly felt it to denegrate the competition into a popularity contest per se. In the end I have no difficulty saying that my vote was a toss up between two threads that I enjoyed and both posts where from people I'd consider friends. I went with the one I thought was most original to the competition itself.

As I see it there is a bigger problem of clone accounts as a means of cheating than people soliciting their friends to consider voting. The reality is that any vote structure creates a tend towards popularity contesting, we need to develop a little bit of faith and a culture of people voting with their conscience to the question posed.

However in the absence of any sort of a voters role, with the potential problem of cliques and simply because it has become an issue vote based competitions for big prizes seems untenable.
 
Yeah - and what about mine - pretty darned topical I'd say - and one of the first ones too.

Just make it random and be done with it - that's how all the comps work anyway.

For the future, if there has to be some kind of voting involved, I like DJ's suggestion.
 
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