We sent out an email earlier today to a wide group of people who had been previously invited to vote on the 32 entries we received for the Monster MashUp Contest. The email is attached below – but the basic gist of it is that we have closed the Monster MashUp Voting Booth until further notice.
Why? The reason is that several accounts were widely abusing the voting rules for the contest, creating fake accounts, and voting up one entry while voting down all the other entries. This flew in the face of the spirit of the contest – making the results of the voting meaningless.
How do you know it was fraud? Well, for one – multiple email addresses were login identical votes within minutes of each other. For example: five accounts would vote up Entry A, while voting down all the other 31 entries. Then another set of accounts would vote up Entry B, and again vote down all the other 31 entries. The result was clearly, from looking at the data, fraudulent account ghosting or at the very least “clique voting” is to blame – which again is not in the spirit of the contest.
What will Nevermet Press be doing next? We are researching alternative voting systems that might be able to combat this sort of fraud better. Jonathan Jacobs is a big fan of REDDIT - so we may be that for the contest since it’s exactly the type of system we need. We have contacted the REDDIT admins for permission before we go live with it; so we’ll keep you in the loop. But don’t worry – the contest will go on! We just need to figure out how best to carry out the voting. The whole issue of voting fraud, quite honestly, took us all by surprise.
Just hang in there – a few bad apples isn’t enough to ruin the whole contest. If you have any questions or suggestions – please feel free to leave them in the comments.
Here’s the email we mailed out earlier:
Greetings,
Please pardon this email – I’m sending it from my personal email account because I don’t want any of you to think I’m trying to use a mailing service or spam. This is an important email regarding voter fraud in the Nevermet Press Monster MashUp Contest.
As many of you know, yesterday Nevermet Press launched the voting phase of the Monster MashUp Contest. Voting was intended to be open to the public, and the idea was that the “crowd” of Nevermet Press fans would decide which of the entries were the best among the 32 we received.
Unfortunately we discovered that there was widespread voting fraud by several people who were creating fictitious accounts and voting multiple times for one entry while voting all other entries down. We did not feel this was in the spirit of the competition. After several hours trying to sort out the issue, we eventually decided that IdeaScale.com – the service provider we were using for the contest – did not have sufficient mechanisms in place for spam voting, fraud, and misconduct. The voting for the Monster MashUp Contest has therefor been closed until we find another solution. We are considering using a REDDIT service instead, but testing has not been completed yet. Hopefully by tomorrow.
We all know that internet voting is open to abuse; but with the right safegaurds in place it can be eliminated or reduced. We tried to roll out an easy system to use so that we might encourage a maximum level of participation; but the downside was that IdeaScale was simply too open for this sort of abuse. So, please accept my most sincere apologies! We will have this sorted out shortly. and posting about this on the Nevermet Press blog.
Thank for your time; and your votes. I do not want you to think that we are spamming emails out to everyone as a matter of common practice. We felt the need to do this so that everyone would understand why we are closing the voting booth early. If you do not want to recieve anymore emails from me regarding the Monster MashUp contest – please let me know simply by replying with “REMOVE ME” or something similar.
Again – my apologies for this; I was surprised and frustrated as anyone when the fraud was discovered.
I’ll be in touch again soon with a brief email once everything is sorted out.
Best regards,
Jonathan Jacobs
Editor in Chief
nevermetpress.com
It’s too bad that a couple people felt the need to do that, but I’m glad you took action to stop it. I look forward to voting once the new system is up.
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m amazed that such a thing happened.
.-= David´s last blog ..A Different Pokemon Alternative =-.
Yeah David… I was blown away. I’m sitting there at my desk _watching_ the voting happen — in minutes an Entry goes from +7 to -5 from multiple accounts voting (that all voted the same way). i was dumbfounded… and then I realized that, unlike REDDIT, IdeaScale doesn’t use “rate limiting” or track IP addresses or even monitor “clique voting” – something REDDIT does all automagically.
I’ve received a lot of great suggestions from folks on how we might re-roll out the voting, aside from using REDDIT (which is, honestly, a bandaid solution). I’m going to sleep on it and decide in a day or so.
Hopefully whatever system you use doesn’t include a “vote down” option. That effectively gives each person two votes, if they vote one entry up and the rest down. I wouldn’t consider it unethical for an entrant to do that on their own account, just in somewhat poor taste.
Did you disqualify the people involved in the fraud? That would probably prevent a recurrence no matter what system you use, since I would hope that no more than one or two people out of 32 in our community would do something like that.
Well – voting was actually open to the public. That was the intent: allow the crowd decide the best entry.
I think it would be best if there is no vote down option at all, but perhaps a single ‘vote for your favourite option’. That means that sure, authors would vote for their own entries but cannot vote others down. I belive this would lead to a fairer reflection of the popularity of the entries. Or perhaps, have the Nevermet Press staff decide on their favourite and award the prize to that instead of a voting system, that while ever it is based on email address, is open to ‘fraud’.
If someone wins that way the dice I make, I swear I’ll curse the dice!…
.-= Abraham´s last blog ..Dice crossbreeding =-.
I’ll agree with getting away from the voting down option. I don’t shy away from being a harsh critic, but I couldn’t bring myself to vote things down instead of just voting up the ones I liked. I really hope this can be hashed out because this was a neat contest.
.-= Josh Board´s last blog ..The Hostage Situation, Part 1 =-.
We decided to go with a semi-private vote. Contestants and NMP content developers will be voting on the entries (about ~50 people). Post about it today in the live feed.
thanks everyone for your input! Sorry this got so bungled. Maybe we should do a series of articles about Pirates and Sniveling Villains next?