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Project One Clarification

Right, I am starting this, because to my utter disappointment, I have been reading about people "manipulating" the voting.

I tried this out...It worked. So some of the bikes are receiving multiple votes from the same people, over and over.

My question is

Do you have to be logged in for a vote to be cast? (I seemed to be able to vote without being logged in, twice)
Can you vote more than once on the same bike? (I also managed to do this)
Can you vote daily on the same bike? (I haven't been able to confirm this)

From what I am reading, there are a number of people, voting over and over on the same bike and artificially bumping the votes up, are these getting counted?

If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.

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101 comments

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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..... Well at least its a level field now i guess. The question was asked, no reply given. I for one will still look for votes (manly because its become quite fun), but i'm not just gonna sit back and watch people sail off in to the distance.
You are right Paul, these competitions are always about promotion above all else

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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It is open season, if I had a bike in, I'd employ ever single tactic, that I would describe as cheating now. can't beat them? Join them, then destroy them...

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Well i have better things to do with my free time than sit and push a button all day. Any time over the next week that my finger goes near a keyboard, it'll be casting a vote for anything without Yellow flames!

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Someone is using a Bot by the way, which IS cheating

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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It has been noted and from my little knowledge, is being dealt with

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gregww1 replied to Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:

It has been noted and from my little knowledge, is being dealt with

Saw that on twitter.

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Well thats good to hear

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Latest up from Trek UK twitter feed.

Quote:

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

<<< Fine.

Quote:

We found the problem, and the culprit(s). Safe to say that the nefarious activity started over the weekend, not before.

<<< NOT fine. I started this thread on Friday and the cheating was going on days before I posted  14

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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It was pointed out days ago. No reply was ever given! As i said before, are we just meant to sit back and watch? I told people this morning on FB, not to waste their time voting because of all this. It's a shame because it was actually a fun competition.

And yes, i could point out two people that were boosting votes right from the word go

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Ok so let me get this right. you have knocked my votes down to three hundred and something, and yet Micheal Downes remains on eighteen hundred and something.. BS!

Goodbye

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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 24  19 x a million....It now looks even more of a fix

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GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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Absolutely hilarious.

I pointed this out in an email to the editor on Wednesday 12th February and got no reply or clarification of the rules.

In fact looking at the homepage for this competition, there seems to be only one important rule:

Quote:

In the unlikely event of a tie between two bikes come the end of the voting process, the winning design will be chosen by a vote from a panel of three judges, two from road.cc and one from Trek Bikes.

Voting will close at 5pm UK time on Friday 21 February. So you have a week and a bit to pick your favourite. Or ceaselessly harangue your mates to vote for you, if you're one of the winners. We'll be pushing out the designs over our social media channels too, to encourage people to come and vote, but voting will only be possible through this page.

That's it! All that remains is to wish the finalists good luck. The entries are listed below. Let voting commence!

.. if some contestants have designed systems to register votes without visiting the road.cc page, a) that definitely is cheating and b) that is incredibly poor security. Presumably the vote mechanism is a 3rd party plugin and at the very least you would expect the transmission between road.cc and the 3rd party to be md5 encrypted and unhackable in less than a week.

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GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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Brendan are you still playing the innocent. You started all this when you got greedy and grabbed 120 votes in one hour, got a gentle warning and still went back for more the next day.

When others saw that was nothing was being done about it they decided to join the party.

I threatened to register 10,001 votes if the nonsense continued and I was well on the way to doing so, without cheating, whatever that is. Every vote I ever submitted was submitted from the road.cc competition page.

road.cc, please define cheating? Is using a proxy server cheating? If so, why didn't you say so up front and take action immediately when it became obvious that this was happening on a massive scale?

To be honest I don't care, this whole contest has left a sour taste in my mouth but stubborn bastard that I am, I am not going to give up.

Should I win, I will do Ride London 100 on the beast and then donate it to one of the charities that I will be raising money for.

I have a lot more to say about this when the competition is over but right now I have some more votes to amass.

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Uk competition laws. Its a good read!

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breezergood replied to GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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GoingRoundInCycles wrote:

Brendan are you still playing the innocent. You started all this when you got greedy and grabbed 120 votes in one hour, got a gentle warning and still went back for more the next day.

When others saw that was nothing was being done about it they decided to join the party.

I threatened to register 10,001 votes if the nonsense continued and I was well on the way to doing so, without cheating, whatever that is. Every vote I ever submitted was submitted from the road.cc competition page.

road.cc, please define cheating? Is using a proxy server cheating? If so, why didn't you say so up front and take action immediately when it became obvious that this was happening on a massive scale?

As i said before, i saw the vote count at the weekend and took a when in Rome stance. FYI, Even then i didn't use a proxy. All you need to do is turn a dongle off and on, then refresh... didn't you boast about computer skills at some point?!
To be honest I don't care, this whole contest has left a sour taste in my mouth but stubborn bastard that I am, I am not going to give up.

Should I win, I will do Ride London 100 on the beast and then donate it to one of the charities that I will be raising money for.

I have a lot more to say about this when the competition is over but right now I have some more votes to amass.

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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Comment blocked apparently.
Figures!

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GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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Quote:

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:

Quote:

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:

Quote:

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.

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GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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PS Good luck to Juliet Elliott. She will be a very worthy winner.

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breezergood | 10 years ago
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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

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gregww1 | 10 years ago
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At this stage I'm not at all convinced about any of the entries with over 1000 votes TBH

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Gkam84 replied to GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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GoingRoundInCycles wrote:

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

Really? This was why I started the thread, after reading comments on social media about voting on her bike.

I must say, it was nothing as far as I could work out to do Juliet herself. But her bike was receiving artificial votes.

The comment and instructions have since been deleted from the offenders facebook and I didn't take a screenshot at the time.

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gregww1 replied to Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:
GoingRoundInCycles wrote:

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

Really? This was why I started the thread, after reading comments on social media about voting on her bike.

I must say, it was nothing as far as I could work out to do Juliet herself. But her bike was receiving artificial votes.

The comment and instructions have since been deleted from the offenders facebook and I didn't take a screenshot at the time.

Comments about the same people voting again? Not sure what you mean.

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gregww1 replied to Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:
GoingRoundInCycles wrote:

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

Really? This was why I started the thread, after reading comments on social media about voting on her bike.

I must say, it was nothing as far as I could work out to do Juliet herself. But her bike was receiving artificial votes.

The comment and instructions have since been deleted from the offenders facebook and I didn't take a screenshot at the time.

Comments about the same people voting again? Not sure what you mean.

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Nope, it was about proxies, someone had links to proxy sites, with instructions on how to use them and which scripts to disable on certain proxy sites aswell

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GoingRoundInCycles replied to Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:
GoingRoundInCycles wrote:

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

Really? This was why I started the thread, after reading comments on social media about voting on her bike.

I must say, it was nothing as far as I could work out to do Juliet herself. But her bike was receiving artificial votes.

The comment and instructions have since been deleted from the offenders facebook and I didn't take a screenshot at the time.

One can never know but the pattern of voting in her case didn't seem particularly dodgy to me. She has a large following on social media so it was to be expected that there would be an initial surge of votes for her. She is also very photogenic and will be good for publicity for Trek and women's cycling.

Individuals are unpredictable but people aren't. You can quite easily predict group behaviour which is why for example election results can be called pretty accurately after relatively few constituents ballots have been counted. You get the odd anomalous seat but the overall patterns are very clear from very early on.

What happened after the initial surge on the first day was that everyone's votes slowed to a steady trickle relative to their place in the pecking order. I was consistently running 7th or 8th keeping company with the purple bike and the blue bike with flames.

When somebody doubles their vote in one hour after two days of steadily declining voting, there can only be one explanation ... that person is voting multiple times for him/herself. You cannot cajole all of your friends and family to vote en masse in such a short space of time. It doesn't happen.

The person in question has now stopped playing possum and freely admits that he voted multiple times by removing the wireless dongle to reset his IP address. Frankly, whether or not he did this via such a crude method or by more sophisticated means, the crucial point that has not been answered by any of the organisers is where do you draw the line? Is voting once at home, again on your iPad, again on your mobile phone, again on your work computer, again in the library on your way home .. all in the same day, is that allowed?

How about connecting to the road.cc site using proxy services to register hundreds of votes? Is that allowed? Is it just a question of quantity and if so exactly ... above a certain amount per day/hour you are 'vote doping'. This is preposterous and making up the rules as you go along, which is not legal in a public competition.

I am absolutely furious and more and more minded to take legal advice about the whole matter. I have effectively been called a cheat, when I have not broken any rules because as far as I can see, there weren't any rules to break!

What are the rules? Even in my initial email to the editor, I made no reference to cheating but speculated that the extreme multiple voting that was going on was not in the spirit of fair play. That was the time when clarification should have been given.

Now the bizarre decision to freeze the votes of some of the contestants and not others ... on what basis? This whole competition is a laughable shambles.

The irony is I quite enjoyed the process of Project One and was seriously considering a custom Domane 6 but I wouldn't touch the brand with a bargepole after what has happened.

Thanks for the tip on print screening ... I am off to capture that libellous tweet ....

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Oh don't tell me it was one of my tweets?  19  21

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GoingRoundInCycles replied to Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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Gkam84 wrote:

Oh don't tell me it was one of my tweets?  19  21

 103

No, it was the dickhead from Trek rattling on about 'vote doping', 'nefarious activity' and banning 'offenders'. My friends and family have been following this competition as well as my colleagues at work and now I have been publicly branded a cheat! Fuck Trek UK!

The more I think about this, the more ridiculous it becomes. Are 'vote doping' and 'nefarious activity' only against the rules when they are for yourself?

Maybe, I should put my computer skills to support one of the minnows? Or will that 'innocent' person be banned for having not attracted the right kind of support.

This is sheer idiocy. If road.cc / Trek UK have any sense they should freeze the competition right now and take legal advice about the mess they have got themselves into and how to go forward from here.

And while this disaster unfolds, still not a public word to explain the inexplicable from the road.cc team ....

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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I will reiterate again, incase someone gets the wrong idea.

My name is Keith McRae....You will see my name at the bottom of this page under contributors...I help run the fantasy game. nothing else. I don't blog/review or do anything else with this site. Nor do I receive any sort of payment, I am not biased towards anyone.

So do NOT take anything I say in this thread as official or on behalf of Road.cc.

Now that is out of the way, I would have pulled the competition and sorted it out. Made a release, to clear it all up. Make it clear what has happened, who has been penalised/disqualified and why that has happened.

I don't need all the gory details. Just X's bike received votes, which were not in the spirit of competition....etc.

I'm not happy that this did not happen last week, when things were raised by a number of people. I started this thread, so everyone could have a say. Keeping it all in one thread, to save everyone starting one. This has happened with the majority of you and I am glad there are not hundreds of threads. I am disappointed at the lack of official clarification, both from Road.cc and Trek.

I know what I have been writing here, will be rubbing against the grain with those in charge of this site and for that, I find myself in the position, that I think it may be difficult for me to carry on with the fantasy game.

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....

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GoingRoundInCycles | 10 years ago
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Quote:

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.

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si.brown | 10 years ago
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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.

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