Hello Warren,
I just noticed the same problem on Prizes.org and came up with a solution that would work perfectly for you too, no matter how many contestants 10, 100 or 1000.
So what needs to be done is more stats need to be shown on a person's profile, right now your four stats (actions, ideas, points, prize money) are itself enough, As in the case of the definitely fake accounts of Rasmi and Usha, their actions far exceeded their ideas. Their handful of ideas did not in anyway justify the big number of their points. Just by using these 3 statistics you can setup a circuit-breaker as soon as a participant appears to be giving less ideas, voting more and collecting points, by using some intelligent programming to calculate the interrelation of the above 3 stats.
But my new idea would refine this automatic "flagging" process even more. Show additional stats such as "Voting: Total Votes Given: 1000, Most Voted For: Sandeep: 800 (80%)", then "Got Voted: Total Votes Received: 400, Most Voted By: Sandeep: 400 (100%)".
On prizes.org what is happening is people are creating fake Just For Fun constests and asking their friends to quickly enter one entry, as soon as their friend makes that entry, they close the contest and award the prize (no money, only prestige points that help improve ranking). Then that friend returns the "favour". One particular obnoxious guy bragged that he had won over 100 contests and he was the king of the world, he started abusing a muslim girl from middle east just because she did not award him the prize money. So i felt sick at looking the kind of abuses being thrown at that unarmed girl, while dozens were ganging up against her. So i decided to investigate the stats of this one idiot account "turman ryan", Prizes lists the following stats on each profile "Contests Won" "Submissions" "Contests Created". It would have been a much easier job for me, if alongside "contests won" the name of the contest creator was listed. I have given the Prizes Team to include the name of the contest creator next to the listings. Now what i noticed was out of the 114 contests this obnoxious bragging absive crybaby fool had won, 60 were 1 horse races, 40 were 2 horse races, 10 were JFN wins with 6-8 entries only, and only 5 real contests were won out of which 3 seemed to have been awarded to him by people he regularly votes for.
So if prizes had a statistic display on top of the profile page, which showed, all extra-ordinary and unusual stats, such as for example that 50 of the 60 1 horse-contests that the cheat won were created by a single-person. This is in fact a very obvious scam but unless these stats as displayed on the page, no one will know.
So for NL/IL, you should also show stats that show not only voted for but also voted against, if the voting patterns (exact likes and dislikes) of a few contestants seem to matching then there are higher chances of those ID being a single person (for example, if you can extract the data of the likes and dislikes entered by Sandeep, Rasmi, Usha, and maybe even Ramya) you will notice that they must be almost identical.
So there can be tons of different stats like this, all you need to do is calculate formulas that set off auto "flags" and maybe add to the scammer-likelihood-score of a person. The people who top such scores should be kept a close eye on.
Best Regards,
Karan
I just noticed the same problem on Prizes.org and came up with a solution that would work perfectly for you too, no matter how many contestants 10, 100 or 1000.
So what needs to be done is more stats need to be shown on a person's profile, right now your four stats (actions, ideas, points, prize money) are itself enough, As in the case of the definitely fake accounts of Rasmi and Usha, their actions far exceeded their ideas. Their handful of ideas did not in anyway justify the big number of their points. Just by using these 3 statistics you can setup a circuit-breaker as soon as a participant appears to be giving less ideas, voting more and collecting points, by using some intelligent programming to calculate the interrelation of the above 3 stats.
But my new idea would refine this automatic "flagging" process even more. Show additional stats such as "Voting: Total Votes Given: 1000, Most Voted For: Sandeep: 800 (80%)", then "Got Voted: Total Votes Received: 400, Most Voted By: Sandeep: 400 (100%)".
On prizes.org what is happening is people are creating fake Just For Fun constests and asking their friends to quickly enter one entry, as soon as their friend makes that entry, they close the contest and award the prize (no money, only prestige points that help improve ranking). Then that friend returns the "favour". One particular obnoxious guy bragged that he had won over 100 contests and he was the king of the world, he started abusing a muslim girl from middle east just because she did not award him the prize money. So i felt sick at looking the kind of abuses being thrown at that unarmed girl, while dozens were ganging up against her. So i decided to investigate the stats of this one idiot account "turman ryan", Prizes lists the following stats on each profile "Contests Won" "Submissions" "Contests Created". It would have been a much easier job for me, if alongside "contests won" the name of the contest creator was listed. I have given the Prizes Team to include the name of the contest creator next to the listings. Now what i noticed was out of the 114 contests this obnoxious bragging absive crybaby fool had won, 60 were 1 horse races, 40 were 2 horse races, 10 were JFN wins with 6-8 entries only, and only 5 real contests were won out of which 3 seemed to have been awarded to him by people he regularly votes for.
So if prizes had a statistic display on top of the profile page, which showed, all extra-ordinary and unusual stats, such as for example that 50 of the 60 1 horse-contests that the cheat won were created by a single-person. This is in fact a very obvious scam but unless these stats as displayed on the page, no one will know.
So for NL/IL, you should also show stats that show not only voted for but also voted against, if the voting patterns (exact likes and dislikes) of a few contestants seem to matching then there are higher chances of those ID being a single person (for example, if you can extract the data of the likes and dislikes entered by Sandeep, Rasmi, Usha, and maybe even Ramya) you will notice that they must be almost identical.
So there can be tons of different stats like this, all you need to do is calculate formulas that set off auto "flags" and maybe add to the scammer-likelihood-score of a person. The people who top such scores should be kept a close eye on.
Best Regards,
Karan
also if someone is being voted up by all the people, and only a few or one person is trying to vote them down, then you can count that in as "jelousy-voting" or "revenge-voting and being unfair, discard those votes and notify that member that his voting patters reflects lousy voting, that he/she obviously knows what wrong they are doing and to refrain from doing so because a close eye is being kept on their activities.
Hello PT,
Someone reignited the comments in this old contest and since i have more new ideas i have posted the comments there, please do keep checking back on that contest and seeing ideas to improve there.
Another Idea to Improve Prizes - once a contest is over (applies effectively to Slogan, Domain, Brand Name, Logo contests) and winner is declared, the Prizes mods should get into action and repeatedly follow up with the contest creator for a link to a page of their official site or a photograph of the product/shop/stationery where teh winning idea has been used. You know, 1000s of ideas are given, 100s of them might be acceptable for use to so many contest creators, but many a times faulty winners are chosen, the Contest Creator themselves might have been confused or they might have deliberately selected their friend/or own ID as winner, in any case, contestants should have the option to peek back at the history of their contests and see the winning ideas being utilised by the client. it should not happen that on the client's site or business card a non-winning idea is being utilised. So a current link to the usage of theideas suggested in the contest is a must.
Another idea: VOTING - if people want to vote then they would be shown a Voting DIalog, kind of like the Hot or Not system where the pictures of two girls were shown, they have to select which of the two entries is better. This will apply mostly to Slogan/Domain Name/Brand Name/Logo Contests, business idea contests can have a different style of voting. Names of the contestants will not be shown only their entries will be shown to remove bias. So people will simply choose which of the two is better. This is one way. This way a proper ranking of the bestidea will be made. Another way is the non comparision, but random display manner, where if someone wants to vote for themselves or their friend in a biased manner they will find it hard to find the entries they are looking for, simply put, when you select the "vote for entries" option, you will be shown a dialog box where random entries flash every 3 seconds, within 3 seconds you have to slide the scale between 1-10, 1 being really bad and 10 being really good. You cannot choose the entries which you want to vote on nor do you see the name of the person who submitted that entry, all u see is one random entry after another, so if you really care to vote, you will have to spend 5-6 minutes going through 60-80 entries. This will be very effective. I'll just mail these ideas to the Prizes team as well.
It would also be a great idea to keep an Improve Prizes.org Contest running permanently week-to-week, every week a winner is decalred and immediately a new contest by the same name is created, where a blog post to the aggregated learnings, ideas from previous contests is compiled and arranged in a meaningful manner. So that people can read those and add more unexplored ideas.
Best Regards,
Karan
Here are my two new ideas
Please do look into tongal's approach of first giving only tweet sized ideas, and having lower pay but for more people for that stage, then the scripting/storyboarding/fleshing out stage has fewer winners but bigger incentive prizes, and the final winner has the biggest obviously and you can take their extended work hours till the campaign is produced and goes live.
