Attached Link: Original Posts from: Dear Tim: An Open Letter

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Re: Dear Tim: An Open Letter by Penguinisto on 12/23/02 11:07

In all honesty, perhaps the vote should've been left alone this go 'round. Mistake or no mistake, there is a credibility issue here.

Current crisis aside, if you're going to vote on it internally, then perhaps members at random could be chosen?

I don't see how it could be more fair than this:

Each member gets only one vote (and to cross-check, each IP address gets only one vote), but no member with less than 30 days of membership will be allowed to vote. This prevents instant clone accounts to vote with, and existing clones from one IP.

There are also lists of known open proxies (they ain't hard to find) whose IP address blocks you can incorporate entirely into a "no-vote" list as well. It can even be done in CIDR notation to save you a few lines of typing.

In either case, it will take some work to do, but if you are interested in making for a fair system, that would be one way to do it.

However, since you'd already opened the doors to public voting, then perhaps you should let the vote run its course.

/P

Re: Dear Tim: An Open Letter by CyberStretch on 12/23/02 11:28

/P's suggestions about trying to "lock down" the voting are pudent. So I will not reiterate them.

It appears that the voting goes:

Galleries -> Hot20 -> AOM -> AOY; with the H20 and AOM decided by the members, correct?

If this is the case, why not have AOY be decided by a cumulative annual total of the AOM votes with the PTB stepping in only when there is a tie?

All this would take is a database backend or other accounting-type setup to add up the individual AOM votes for an entire year and, based upon the number of votes for any given artist, the one who has had the most AOM votes in the year wins AOY.

It seems to me that this would be a fair methodology of determining an AOY recipient by the members without the potential for abuse nor allowing the bias of the site/PTB to affect the outcome; unless the rare chance that two artists receive the exact same amount of AOM votes in any given year.

I think that the idea of letting Renderosity Members who have been members for X amount of months allowed to vote would be the best solution for future contests. Say anyone who has 2-3 months of membership to Renderosity is entitled to vote for AOM/AOY. And if that member hasn't been on for thirty days, even if they've been around for three years, they aren't allowed to vote. Shouldn't to hard to code.. But as for this current one... that had been opened to the public, mistake or not, votes were gathered. Those votes should be honored and allowed to stand in the interest of being fair. Just my two pennies. Jack

That wouldn't work either Cyberstretch, because the Poser contests get far more votes than the other galleries (not because that galleries art is better or not, but because it's far more popular a place), and thus it would always be the Poser AoM that would get AoY...Which would leave a lot of great artists like Hobbit, who won last year, out of it...

I do like Penguinisto's idea, but I would add to that no more campaigning. The art is the art and that's it. How "fair" is it if one artist can manipulate the vote by such advertisements?

No matter how fair it would seem to be, you are always going to get this argument. There are 100,000 different minds on here and there will always be the feeling that someone is cheated. As I said before, and Cheryle had also, that they should just get rid of these "popularity" polls and find some other method by which to showcase artists...

That should be gallery's there in that first line. Need to wake up before posting...

hiyas shadow! Hugs! Now get back to work you slacker!

One way forward would be to follow the example of the challenge polling in the Bryce forum, whereby a thread is created for voting. Members post their votes to the specific thread, revealing who is voting, what time and day the vote is posted and with an option to give a reason for their vote. This way there is no possibilty of multiple votes or any other obscure means of rigging the poll going unnoticed, every vote is in the open and the problems of doubts in secret ballots is overcome. I am sure some members would like to keep their vote a secret , however, for the sake of fairness and transparency in the competitions etc, this would would satisfy the need for an equitable outcome. If members are sincere in their vote? then there is no danger of loosing face with other members and friends in this community. The chore of counting and collating the result would be well worth the effort as it would put the the whole matter above reproach. I am sure that there are many here who would be glad to verify the count for you! This method works perfectly well elsewhere in this community, I do not see why it could not work for AOY. Preferment is a discredited method of gaining an end, particularly when it is dispensed by the few. Sincerely. Brendan.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1016109

"That wouldn't work either Cyberstretch, because the Poser contests get far more votes than the other galleries (not because that galleries art is better or not, but because it's far more popular a place), and thus it would always be the Poser AoM that would get AoY...Which would leave a lot of great artists like Hobbit, who won last year, out of it..." Good point that I did not think of. Perhaps if I amended the suggestion to state that the Top Artist for each category/forum could be determined the way I described then a member vote based off the Top Artists is used to determine the AOY, would that suffice the discrepancy? Of course, one must consider that the voting percentages from each category/forum could be unequal (ie, there may be more Poser voters than Bryce, for example) therefore potentially swaying the voting again to a Poser vs a Bryce artist. I think the overall removal of any contests/"popularity polls" would be a disservice to the community for the following reasons: 1) IIRC, the prizes are usually donated by site sponsors. The site sponsors benefit by showing generosity and interest/involvement in the community. 2) R'osity benefits from attracting more artists. 3) The artist(s) benefit from the pride and prestige of the award. 4) The community benefits from being exposed to other artists' art, and the potential to win something they may/may not be able to afford. It could work out to a win-win-win-win situation; like I would imagine its original intention was supposed to be. I also like Brendan's suggestion of showing the person who voted and their vote vs a blind ballot type vote to be another "check and balance" of reducing potential "ballot stuffing" or "miscalculations".

cyber see the thread link above- i think that is some sort of experiment with what you have said?

I saw. It is in-line with what Brendan suggested and it would be interesting to see how it eventually turns out. At least they are actively trying something, so you have to give JeffH/R'osity that much credit.

I realize this is an unofficial vote but my question is why that post resides in the Poser forum. I mean,is it the "Poser" artist of the year? Just curious. Tom

JeffH, being a Poser Mod, probably wanted to conduct an "experiment" of sorts in an environment he could control - JIC it gets out-of-hand.

Ahh..okay gotcha, After these things start going into 5 or 6 different threads,it becomes difficult to follow. It would be nice if the topics could stay within a thread or two. It seems a new thread gets started to say basically the same things over and over. I voted for Nitro115. I feel he is the most versitile. Tom

Just a reminder: That was only my opinion on why it is in the Poser forum - me not being a mod or an insider and all. Given that it is "unofficial" I took that as meaning "experimental". Hopefully, if they choose to go this route, they would place the vote or a link to it in a more central location where all are likely to see it and respond as they desire (ie, possibly a link in the header section vs on the Front Page since some people - like myself - never bother with the Front Page).

shrug i really need a speel chek

Jack - I see where you're coming from. You know that little "online for x minutes" thingy up in teh upper RH corner of the page? Why not just total that up, and once the total comes to, oh, 3000 minutes in a minimum of 25 different sessions (that's 50 hours of 2-hour sessions in total), then a member is eligible to vote. The whole thing can be consolidated in roughly 300 lines of code, and integrated as a module that all votings and polls must pass through. It could be something to shoot for as a member, and a way to prove you're "not a newbie" or something. Even if a clone were to try to circumvent it (like, say, some artist gets his entire yahoo newsgroup to register and cast a vote), they would have to login at least 25 times (or so) to vote for something, evne the "Hot 20." It would take all the clone accounts a long time to gain eligibility, and thus it would effectively stop the "campaigns", or at least the external ones. Current accounts of a member's confederates just sitting idle waiting to vote would also be ineligible to vote until they actually look at the site for long enough to get the right. I figure that the time frame would be equivalent to a member being active for at least 3-4 months, yes? /P

"I figure that the time frame would be equivalent to a member being active for at least 3-4 months, yes?"

2hrs/day for 25 sessions (= 50hrs or 3000mins) would equate to less than a month, if the sessions were limited to 1/day. If it is only broswer sessions, one could accomplish it in:

• 24hrs/day / 2hrs/session = 12 sessions/day
• 25 sessions / 12 sessions/day = ~2 days

If someone wanted to be sly enough, you could run a bot/script/etc to accomplish just that: connect for 2hrs, disconnect briefly, reconnect for 2hrs; lather, rinse, repeat.

Depending upon what metrics they keep track of (and only admins/mods or previous employees, etc, would really know), they could qualify members based off similar standards, though.

Hrm... yeah, you're right. Maybe we'd have to force it to wait a month or two just in case. /P

I think that's a darn good idea Penguinisto...

Peng, That's fine for places where it doesn't cost money to connect (USA mainly). You're going to exclude a lot of people who pay for phone-time all the time they're online - like me, for instance. I have no clones here and have been a member in good standing for about 18 months. Still, from what I understand of your suggestion, I'm going to be ineligible unless I pay my phone company a small fortune for long sessions online. Not a working option for many of us. Your motive is excellent but unfortunately the outcome would be arbitrary disqualification of a whole bunch of people who should be able to vote. I'd rather go with Brendan's idea of having the voting out in the open in one thread. It works well in the Bryce forum (although there are no prizes) and I'm interested to see the outcome of JeffH's experiment.

Cambert - if you've already been on for 18 months, then you've already accumulated the time in spades. I do realize (but forgot) that there are places with modem tax or an expensive phone fee, and perhaps IP's originating from those countries can be prorated or even eliminated (it's real easy to check), since bandwidth is expensive enough there to discourage clones and etc. Voting openly is cool, so long as someone in the PTB is willing to tally up the votes, and we don't blow someone's buffer as they scroll down. What if we were to take JeffH's idea and compress it? Say, set it up so that you can only insert a one-line (80 character) reply (just enough room for someone's name and a real small comment)? That way your name is still public, but you don't have to wear out your scroll wheel to get to the "reply" section :) /P

Just put the reply / message box at the top of the page, folks that only want to vote can do it without going any further, those that wish to read on can then do so.

Also! the number of votes could be limited to pages of about fifty messages. Four pages of fifty messages is simpler than one page of two hundred messages if folks wish to browse. Solutions can and will be found.

well would it be possible to only have enough space for just the name? in the experiment- they are lecturing! each other about the choices made ;P. Don't know about anyone else- but i chose who i did for my own reasons and i make no apologies for it. shrug

I guess I don't understand the motivation to limit
voting to long-time members. What would be the point
of that? You already need to become a member to vote,
and some care has been taken to prevent people from
creating sock puppet accounts in order to stuff ballot
boxes. Why not let newcomers vote?

Asalina because last year it was charged that a member who was in the running had either freinds at their house making accounts and voting for the member or the member themselves was making clone accounts to vote for themselves. The time thing is to try and eliminate spontanious cloning.

Also- i have access to at least 15 different ip addresses. Even if they recorded and logged the ip from my one computer, in theory, i coukd just move on to the next ip address, create a clone account, vote, and move on. Even if they did record the ip's and put in a pop up that says- " this ip has already voted" it is still easy to get around that.

Plus it helps prevent folks from harvesting votes from newsgroups or other communities they frequent. Folks would come her,create an account just to vote,never to return. Tom

Also it would insure that Renderosity has an actual active member database. Rather than someone only logging on to vote for a friend and then disappearing again for several months at a time. Jack

Hey! i dissapear for months at a time ;P it's a work thing! LOL

LOL... Sorry Cheryle and I can relate, the sites I work on often leave me too tired to come over here and see more... ah... "disturbances in the force"... ::smiles and then shrugs::

well here's a thought, may not be a popular one but it is a thought. Perhaps a members contributions could make them eligble to vote as well. A contribution could either be in the form of a marketplace purchase or a donation to free stuff(made at some point, doesn't have to be a contiual thing)...this could be in addition to the rule of having had to spend X number of hours here and it's doubful that a person with 20 accounts would want to log in under a different user ID every time they made a purchase or what have you since that would get confusing and expensive...I guess the downfall is that the same person could just upload a peice of crap to free stuff under each username to establish their eligibility as well but I think they would be less likely, considering all the other check systems in place, fewer and fewer with multiple accounts would be able to meet all critera...

That's a good thought, not sure how workable it would be tho. For instance- i prefer to have my free stuff hosted at a different site, again for reasons of my own. I also no longer support the marketplace here (again for reasons of my own) That really doesnt mean i am not a contributing member. Lots of us contribute in ways the majority of people here will never see. Such as: I have given grouping tutorials in the chat room before, i have given and still photoshop, illustrator, other application tips and tricks in chat, i have given application software tips in forums before...and i know others who do the same, but all those would be excluded under the requirements you suggest. It's not bad idea,and i understand why it would be a decent check and balance thing, i just am not sure it would be workable. Then there's people like Anthony Appleyard- who has extensively given and given and given to this comunity- but keeps losing places to host his free stuff, repeatedly.

actually I had just remembered as you replied that there were other forms of contributions, such as Tutorials and Articles that one could make....also I don't think Renderosity hosts any of the free stuff...none of my freebies are hosted here but they are listed in the database..:)

and there would just have to be a record of it, since I know it is sometimes hard to find places to host things and it's impossible for some to keep them up forever and not everyone wants to buy things at the marketplace continually....

"not everyone wants to buy things at the marketplace continually...." Yah but my credit card company wants me to do just that ;D

It would be much harder to run a "sniffer" to search or reconize the member as being a contributor. Much easier for the "sniffer" program to refer to the member's cookie to check last log in time/date. Jack

lol...so does mine..;D

that is true Jack, but maybe going forward there could be code in place that just makes a record of when a contribution is made and that information stays with the user's information in the database....none of this would be easy to implement, that goes without saying...

Melissa said: "code in place that just makes a record of when a contribution is made and that information stays with the user's information in the database" Yeah, it could be done though a bit more cumbersome than the "time spent online" sniffer. However, as you pointed out, a person could just upload a bogus freebie or contribution in order to activate the voting process and would require additional monitoring from admins to check the validity of each voter... which incidently should remain secret ballot. Though your idea could be done, it would require too much maintance and upkeep from an already overwork, underpaid and unappreciated staff of admins. Jack

So, has management proposed reinstating the voting if the process can be made "cheat-proof"? I mean, they seem to be saying clone voting is the issue--so if it's no longer an issue then AOY voting could continue--right?

One would hope, Mosca, because otherwise there really isn't a need for a popular Artist Contest if their peers can't have a vote or say in the process. Jack

Jack, while I don't disagree with your issues I should make one distiction which I think you overlooked in my original post. This idea was in addition to the propsed idea of tracking the time one spends at the site...not in place of it....and there is no gaurantee that the admins will even consider anything we are suggesting here so we might as well offer the most complete suggestion of all(assuming that everyone agrees, this is of course up to everyone). And I'm aware it would take alot of work and that the staff already works hard...I am a web developer myself and am aware of what would be involved in a project such as this one..:) Melissa

melissa how good are you at programming? do you know php?

I understood your suggestion just fine. No need to be snide about it, Melissa. Jack

It wasn't intended to be snide, Jack and I apologize if it came across that way..:) Melissa

It's okay, sorry for the confusion, Melissa, sometimes the written form is much harder to decern tone than spoken. Jack

Close contest voting to new members (less than a week, say). Double check final vote tallies and throw out all votes from older clone accounts (this they can do already). What's the big deal?

or just close the voting to members who join on or after the day the vote is put up...

Actually, since this site is most likely run with a database backend, there really is very little to limit what "could" be done with that info other than the willingness of those with the ability to modify the site to do so. For example: Contributions All that would be necessary would be an additional field in the user database record that gets incremented per contribution. --- Example: Member: JohnDoe ... Contrib: 0 JohnDoe uploads a freebie or MP item: Contrib = (Contrib+1) = 1 === The database would do all the accounting on the fly in an easy to reference way to boot. My problem with the "Contributions" suggestion is that everyones' contributions may/may not be "measureable". I may be good at answering Hardware/Technical questions, but I completely stink at modelling. So, although I "contribute" to the knowledge of the site, I would be excluded from voting because I do not make/upload freebies/MP items. I do think, however, that creating a "checks and balances" vs clone accounts is sensible; since that apparently set off the policy changes to begin with. If you reduce or eliminate potential for human tampering, then fairness can be as objective as comparing one number vs another.

Okay, seing as how CyberStretch has managed to bully me (joking) into this thread, let's see what we've got so far, sort through what might be viable and what isn't, and see if there's a concensus on something that might go forward as a proposal. Seem fair?

Please bear in mind that I'm not a serious programmer and know nothing about how the backend database is actually structured or interrogated, so even if something seems like a good idea, it might not be attainable in practice.

I wish I had a suggestion to throw into the pot myself, but I haven't. So here's a precis of what's come up so far and how it looks to me.

Ideas that don't seem to be workable (to me anyway), and why

Only allowing one vote from an IP address. If we all had static IP's this would work fine, but many folks have dynamic IP's from a dialup account. So only allowing one vote per IP would likely not stop clone voting and may inadvertantly block a legal vote because somebody already had that IP yesterday and voted from it.

AOY be decided by a cumulative annual total of the AOM votes. Probably (but not definitely) this would result in a Poser artist being the AOY every time since the Poser AOM contest is likely to get the most voting.

Voting in a thread. This could well discourage people from voting at all, or fell compelled to vote for their friend who is in the running even if they prefer someone elses work.

Tallying 'contributions'. I think it'd be very difficult to come up with a fair system for doing that. Freestuff? A lot of folks, me included, don't consider their stuff good enough to put on display. MP purchases? Not everyone uses the MP, and it could look as if we were using that criterion to drive people into the MP, further fuelling the 'only interested in the bottom line' argument.

Ideas that might help

A minimum time of membership before being allowed to vote. As stated before, this would eliminate instant clones. One problem I can forsee is that this would disbar new but valid members from voting, which might not be acceptable.

Blocking open proxies.

An account should have been used in the month prior to the vote being cast.

Tracking the amount of time a member is here. I really like this one, and it's got the most chance IMO of working. It would have to be very carefully done not to exclude users of dialups though...

Any further ideas, thoughts/whatever? Any agreements/disagreements on how I've categorised things?

Kevin.