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Late last week we were made aware of irregularities that were going on with the kit design competition we held together with Footy Headlines over the past few weeks.
In this post, we want to further address the situation, expanding the Twitter thread from Friday evening.
It's important to note that we are very grateful that we were made aware of the issues just in time before we would have announced the winner of the competition. Once we had confirmed the fraud, we decided to "transfer" the rest of the voting over to Twitter while we would implement the necessary changes to prevent vote manipulation in the future. For more details on
You can vote in the Big Final now over on our Twitter.
During our investigation, we identified several issues with how the site and competitions were ran until now that enabled a small group of users to "hijack" the competition. What happened was that this group of users created a large number of accounts to vote on their entries in the competitions.
So far we have implemented the following changes:
If required, we have identified even more possible updates, which would require more complicated and time-consuming development from us. For now, we will closely watch for any irregularities and decide accordingly.
In other news, we also have plans to once again update the competition format, although those are not quite related to the recent incident. Within the team we feel that the current mode of competitions creates a very long waiting time from the first round to the final. While we think that the head-to-head format is inherently fair, we want to have two stages in future competitions - in the first stage, the field of participants would be trimmed down to a more manageable number, like 16 or 32. Those entries would then compete in head-to-head or best-of-four votes until the final. This doesn't mean that we will bring back pre-selections - the first round would also solely be based on user votes.
At the moment it looks like this new format will not be implemented in time for the current "Music" competition but rather the one that will follow it.
In this post, we want to further address the situation, expanding the Twitter thread from Friday evening.
It's important to note that we are very grateful that we were made aware of the issues just in time before we would have announced the winner of the competition. Once we had confirmed the fraud, we decided to "transfer" the rest of the voting over to Twitter while we would implement the necessary changes to prevent vote manipulation in the future. For more details on
You can vote in the Big Final now over on our Twitter.
During our investigation, we identified several issues with how the site and competitions were ran until now that enabled a small group of users to "hijack" the competition. What happened was that this group of users created a large number of accounts to vote on their entries in the competitions.
So far we have implemented the following changes:
- Going forward, all created accounts will require email verification
- Newly created accounts will not be allowed to vote in competitions; they will still be able to enter, though
- Suspicious voting will be flagged to the team automatically and manually reviewed
- There's now also a system to temporarily ban users in case they violate the integrity of competitions
If required, we have identified even more possible updates, which would require more complicated and time-consuming development from us. For now, we will closely watch for any irregularities and decide accordingly.
In other news, we also have plans to once again update the competition format, although those are not quite related to the recent incident. Within the team we feel that the current mode of competitions creates a very long waiting time from the first round to the final. While we think that the head-to-head format is inherently fair, we want to have two stages in future competitions - in the first stage, the field of participants would be trimmed down to a more manageable number, like 16 or 32. Those entries would then compete in head-to-head or best-of-four votes until the final. This doesn't mean that we will bring back pre-selections - the first round would also solely be based on user votes.
At the moment it looks like this new format will not be implemented in time for the current "Music" competition but rather the one that will follow it.