Project One Clarification

Comment blocked apparently.
Figures!

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So, some select individuals have been vote doping in the @roadcc Project One competition. WAVDA has caught you, & you are banned.

Absolutely hilarious!

For those who want to know the facts about what happened here, on Wednesday 12th February, I noticed some very suspicious voting patterns where one person, who knows who he is, and is protesting just a bit too much, gained more than 120 votes in an hour. This was clearly preposterous so I pointed it out to the editor in an email to seek clarification:

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Hi David,

Just a quick note about the competition. I don't know if you have noticed but there are some very strange voting patterns happening this evening concerning the bike entered by ********** ********** which by my estimation has garnered more than 120 votes in the last hour.

It is of course possible that this surge is generated by use of social media but I am suspicious and watching the situation.

I know people can vote more than once, I have done so myself, but I personally think that using some sort of proxy service to disguise IP or a script to auto vote is not in the spirit of the competition and turns it into a farce and I say that as someone with no axe to grind and no chance of winning being more than 300 votes behind the leader, ********.

Just so you know.

Anyway, cheers for running a great magazine and a competition that has been a lot of fun.

Regards

I have yet to receive a reply. Nothing was done.

I pointed out elsewhere in the forum, gently but firmly that I knew what that person was up to but greedily, that person chose to blatantly raid the bin again the next day this time joined by another contestant.

Not sure what to do feeling very unhappy with the situation, I decided to level the field with a strongly worded warning and then go to war:

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It is now blatantly obvious that repeat voting is going on from more than one candidate from the same computer. Even with the use of social media, let's say you have 500 followers, they are not all going to stop what they are doing at 10:30 - 11:30 pm to vote en masse and if they did, when you checked you would see big jumps in the votes rather than a steady trickle of 2-3 votes per minute just enough time for one voter to find another proxy reload the page and fire ....... then abruptly nothing overnight.

It is a shame that the contest has now become a computer skills competition but to be honest it was never a design one. I am delighted to have been shortlisted and a Top 10 finish would be great but I am sorely tempted to use my own considerable computer skills to award myself 10,001 votes on the last day of voting, just to highlight the level of farce.

Of course, should I not be disqualified, the bike would go to charity.

It seems that another contestant could no longer standby and watch so that person joined the party and doubled his vote overnight.

Being a stubborn bastard I gave in to my sore temptation to highlight the level of farce and carry out my threat to secure 10,001 votes but realising that attempting to do it all on the last day could be construed as a denial of service attack, I opted for a more gradual approach. Rest assured had I 'won' that bike, it was going straight to charity.

road.cc and Trek have had long enough to get involved and put a stop to this nonsense but have chosen not to do so out of a greedy desire for hits and publicity. There are all sorts of steps that could have been easily taken to make the contest fairer but still generate plenty of hits.

So Trek UK and road.cc, what exactly constitutes 'vote doping', why didn't you spell out what was and was not permissible in the first place, and wait til now to take action against processes that have been going on for nearly a week?

Project Farce, Goodnight, RIP.

PS Good luck to Juliet Elliott. She will be a very worthy winner.

You can keep on all you like. Fact is i never used a proxy. i explained what i did, when i did it and why, a few moments ago but the comment was never allowed.

You've got brown on your nose btw http://road.cc/sites/all/modules/smileys/packs/Yahoo!/clap.gif

At this stage I'm not at all convinced about any of the entries with over 1000 votes TBH

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I just had to speak up, because I saw this competition being "fixed" by some parties.

Some will say, "it is only a bike" and while this is true, would your opinion be different if it was £3200 in cold hard cash....

... the problem being, define 'fixed'?

Is that more than one vote per person per day for their own bike?

Is that using social media to encourage supporters to vote for you multiple times?

Is that using computer skills to generate more votes than you could do with a standard Internet connection?

If your background is in robotics, would it be legal for you to program a robot to be up all night clicking a mouse and hitting refresh?

The thing is you cannot run a public competition for a prize that has value with wishy-washy definitions like "spirit of fair play". If I felt that one of the contestants was cheating, I would have had no hesitation of saying so publicly or in my email to the editor. I actually don't know how it would be possible to cheat in a competition where the major rule, highlighted in bold type is that

"voting is only possible through this page".

As long as you navigate to the competition page and click the like button you are complying with those rules whether you arrived there by mobile phone, home computer, iPad, proxy server etc.

What would be cheating would be to write a script on a computer that just targets the address of the voting database, bypassing the competition page altogether and quite frankly if you have the skills to do that to any self-respecting encrypted connection you have probably got much bigger fish to fry than winning a £3000 bike.

As somebody else who made it through to the final 25 I feel compelled to add my 10 pence worth.

I noticed on Saturday, as several other contestants did, that one design was gaining a huge number of votes extremely quickly. I'll be honest, I had voted for myself on my phone, work pc, laptop etc which I'm sure most other contestants also did. On Saturday evening my wife discovered a ridiculously simple way of voting multiple times. By shutting down and re-opening a certain browser you could simply vote over and over again.

Before this point I was pretty resigned to not winning anything, but on seeing that the competition was about as robust as a chocolate teapot I figured what the heck! My wife and I, along with one or two close friends and family members went for it to catch up with the person now leading by miles. Although I know many friends and family were continuing to vote "properly", between 4 or 5 of us we were able to put on hundreds of votes within a few hours.

I completely agree with those that say this isn't acting in the spirit of the competition, but at the end of the day I can't afford to buy a decent road bike, let alone one of this spec. My motive was simply that I wasn't going to lose out on this opportunity just because of a technical issue with the voting.

As far as I'm concerned the entire competition is a complete farce. Even with the bizarre action taken tonight (removing votes without communicating how or why this decision was reached, and the seemingly random number of votes removed from some but not others), there is no way that a winner can be identified fairly through the current voting mechanism.

I've reached the point where I don't really care if I win or not. I'd much rather the public vote was called off and a panel of judges appointed a winner based on merit, not how many friends/followers you have or how IT savvy/sneaky you are.

For the record my vote for the best design goes to Ed Greenough, if I wasn't in the competition I'd be voting for you!

Having said all of this I intend to keep voting for myself, and encouraging others to do so, as I don't trust the organisers to act fairly and am assuming that the winner will still be the design with the "most" votes (although based on this evening that's whoever the organisers want it to be).

My apologies if anyone feels I've "cheated" or have undermined the spirit of the competition.

As far as I can tell, one person in the Top 4 at that time had no votes removed at all. Her supporters must all be saints .....

Genuinely ... that was my last word. No really.

Well, well, well ...

It gets more and more interesting. I conducted a little experiment by voting an equal number of times for myself and for Juliet Elliott using exactly the same method.

My votes have just been deleted and the votes for Juliet remain safe and sound ....

Draw your own conclusions, but the next time I carry out this experiment it will be in the presence of my lawyer.

This has gone past being sad now.

Apparently it is about the bike

I am now officially glad that I didnt get round to submitting an entry.

My entry has only 'lost' about 6 votes! But I'm still in 13th.

This is all quite intriguing, better than an average week of Corrie!

I did design and enter one bike but, as per a couple of comments above, I'm glad I didn't get through if this is what the competition was actually about.

On a possibly related note, I've noticed that various forum threads seem to have an unusually high number of likes against individual posts too, this being an example:

http://road.cc/content/forum/110280-should-cyclists-ride-pavements

Can't imagine that's as a result of genuine new traffic to the site from this competition...

Ok, this is just getting silly now. Accusations are flying around, vote rigging, talk of disqualification (that hasn't materialised), possible favouritsm, no clarity on what constitutes cheating and what doesn't, votes for some mysteriously disappearing without written explanation whilst others are not affected, and now the voting page has been relegated to the depths of the news section where no casual visitor who might actually be tempted to place an unbiased vote will ever find it.

The organisers need to make a coherent statement today giving a full explanation, before the competition closes in order to give reasonable time for all competitors to respond. I simply do not trust the number of votes being cast for some entries, including those currently leading after others were penalised. If the organisers can't or won't say anything on the matter then I'd like my entry to be removed from voting and an apology issued by Trek and road.cc to all those that have voted for wasting their valuable time.

Edit at 15:41 18/02: Just received a tweet from the organisers, they are working on a plan and will have a solution soon. Finally, this might get sorted out.

I haven't unleashed my final assault yet, so don't be surprised when my votes suddenly spike from one an hour to three.

And, I'll have you know I'm quite an attractive MAMIL, with my man-boobs and beard. They could do a piece on me and how this bike helps transform me into a lean, mean riding machine, lol.

Not being in the final 25, perhaps my views are meaningless. But it seems to me that whatever happens, one person will be getting a bike they didn't previously have, and haven't paid for; and 24 others are no worse off than they were.

Had entries required stumping up of cash, I'd feel differently. But as it is I can just see a whole lot of greed. Which isn't particularly becoming.

That's more like it.

All right, let’s have a bit of calm. Trek is giving away a £3,400 road bike, and getting grief for it because of what some see as ‘cheating’ in an online competition. Bit whiny and sad, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing: we can see who’s voting and we can see a lot about how they’re voting. Pretty much everyone is trying to use the voting system to their advantage.

Some ways of doing that are acceptable. Getting your friends to vote for you, even getting them to do it regularly: that’s okay, this is an online competition after all. Getting your IT skills to vote for you, over and over again: that’s not okay.

Votes that we think fall in to the latter category will be deleted - we’ve already done that once and when voting closes we will look at the votes cast for every entrant and where necessary do it again.

As a reminder, here is part of the terms and conditions everyone agreed to when they entered this competition:

"By taking part in this competition you agree to be bound by the competition rules and by the decisions of Farrelly Atkinson which are final in all matters relating to the competition."

http://road.cc/content/news/99572-design-and-win-trek-project-one-bike-w...£3200

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"By taking part in this competition you agree to be bound by the competition rules ...... "

The problem being ... you didn't publish any!

Well, just one, " ..... but voting will only be possible through this page."

.... and by the decisions of Farrelly Atkinson which are final in all matters relating to the competition.

... except that you too are subject to the rule of law and are not Emperors who can make up the rules as you go along to get the outcome that you desire.

For example, one of your rules is that no correspondence will be entered into. So how is it right that it has taken until now for anyone at road.cc to correspond on this issue ... while Trek UK Twitter have been very actively communicating with contestants, to the point where one might surmise a vested interest, in one of them ...

I think Si Brown has pretty much hit the nail on the head there.

'you cannot run a public competition for a prize worth thousands and make it up as you go along.'

Why not?

As I said, there are rules governing how competitions are run, anyone who has had votes deleted should read this and then decide whether or not it is worth your while to take action:

an extract from Committee of Advertising Practice website giving advice about how to run a competition, professionally:

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Promoters need to take care that appropriate measures are in place to ensure that the structure, or mechanic, of their promotion is not open to abuse. Allowing abuse is likely to cause consumers who have participated fairly to be disadvantaged.

Sometimes participants might simply be seeking to improve their chances of success in legitimate ways but on other occasions, they might be deliberately abusing the promotion by acting in a way that is not expressly prohibited by the T&Cs. A promoter’s understanding of ‘abuse’ may be different to that of the ASA (or participants’) and care needs to be taken to communicate restrictions of entry clearly.

Promoters must state clearly how participants should behave and should be wary of disqualifying those who have followed the letter of the conditions but whose actions seem unfair in retrospect.

For example, in 2012, the ASA ruled that a promoter should not have withdrawn the promise of prizes after deciding the ‘winner’ had acted improperly. Ts&Cs stated a limit of one entry, per e-mail address, per hourly prize draw but did not expressly prohibit multiple entries from a single IP address. Because the complainant had used the same IP address but a different e-mail address for each entry, the ASA ruled that the promoter caused unnecessary disappointment when it withdrew the prizes after notifying the complainant that they had won (PepsiCo International Ltd, 21 November 2012).

Wow ... and PepsiCo actually took the trouble to publish some rules in advance, unlike ....

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Creating and enforcing T&Cs retrospectively is unacceptable - even if the aim is to combat abuse (Meeeeet.com t/a Piingwin.com ApS, 3 October 2012). In 2012, a promoter disqualified a participant because it considered she had unfairly canvassed votes. The ASA considered that canvassing for votes was commonplace on social media sites and upheld the complaint because the T&Cs did not state that such behaviour was prohibited and would lead to disqualification (The Number UK Ltd, 4 April 2012).

A promoter running a competition to win a wedding who encouraged the finalists to “Tell your friends, tell your relatives, tell everyone you can! The more votes you get, the better your chance of winning.” and then retrospectively introduced restrictions to the voting tactics that finalists could use was held to have administered the promotion unfairly (The Halifax Courier Ltd, 18 September 2013).

... sounds familiar? ....

http://www.cap.org.uk/Advice-Training-on-the-rules/Advice-Online-Databas...

So when do the contestants who have had votes deducted retrospectively get their votes back, or do they need to complain to the CAP?

Get over it.........it was a bit of fun.