Project One Clarification

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Get over it………it was a
Get over it………it was a bit of fun.

As I said, there are rules
As I said, there are rules governing how competitions are run, anyone who has had votes deleted should read this and then decide whether or not it is worth your while to take action:

an extract from Committee of Advertising Practice website giving advice about how to run a competition, professionally:

Promoters need to take care that appropriate measures are in place to ensure that the structure, or mechanic, of their promotion is not open to abuse. Allowing abuse is likely to cause consumers who have participated fairly to be disadvantaged.

Sometimes participants might simply be seeking to improve their chances of success in legitimate ways but on other occasions, they might be deliberately abusing the promotion by acting in a way that is not expressly prohibited by the T&Cs. A promoter’s understanding of ‘abuse’ may be different to that of the ASA (or participants’) and care needs to be taken to communicate restrictions of entry clearly.

Promoters must state clearly how participants should behave and should be wary of disqualifying those who have followed the letter of the conditions but whose actions seem unfair in retrospect.

For example, in 2012, the ASA ruled that a promoter should not have withdrawn the promise of prizes after deciding the ‘winner’ had acted improperly. Ts&Cs stated a limit of one entry, per e-mail address, per hourly prize draw but did not expressly prohibit multiple entries from a single IP address. Because the complainant had used the same IP address but a different e-mail address for each entry, the ASA ruled that the promoter caused unnecessary disappointment when it withdrew the prizes after notifying the complainant that they had won (PepsiCo International Ltd, 21 November 2012).

Wow … and PepsiCo actually took the trouble to publish some rules in advance, unlike ….

Creating and enforcing T&Cs retrospectively is unacceptable – even if the aim is to combat abuse (Meeeeet.com t/a Piingwin.com ApS, 3 October 2012). In 2012, a promoter disqualified a participant because it considered she had unfairly canvassed votes. The ASA considered that canvassing for votes was commonplace on social media sites and upheld the complaint because the T&Cs did not state that such behaviour was prohibited and would lead to disqualification (The Number UK Ltd, 4 April 2012).

A promoter running a competition to win a wedding who encouraged the finalists to “Tell your friends, tell your relatives, tell everyone you can! The more votes you get, the better your chance of winning.” and then retrospectively introduced restrictions to the voting tactics that finalists could use was held to have administered the promotion unfairly (The Halifax Courier Ltd, 18 September 2013).

… sounds familiar? ….

http://www.cap.org.uk/Advice-Training-on-the-rules/Advice-Online-Database/Sales-Promotions-Abuse.aspx

So when do the contestants who have had votes deducted retrospectively get their votes back, or do they need to complain to the CAP?

si.brown wrote:My mother has

si.brown wrote:

My mother has zero IT skills and she could still vote over and over again for my design thanks to the useless voting mechanism.

Where do you draw the line?

This +100000000

How do you define “regularly” when referring to friends voting? How regular is too regular and will result in votes being deleted?

Why have some entrants been stripped of hundreds of votes (admittedly gained through repeat voting) whilst others (also blatantly using the same tactic) remain 1000 votes ahead?

It is still happening today. I have had votes removed today using the same exact method to vote for Juliet Elliott and other contestants who have had no votes removed. Si, my advice to you is if you can say hand on heart that every vote that you gained to the best of your knowledge was by someone going to the competition web page and physically clicking on the like button … take legal advice about the mass deletion of your votes. You haven’t broken any of the published rules governing the operation of this ‘competition’.

The British Code of Advertising, Sale Promotion and Direct Marketing (known as ‘the CAP Code’) sets out certain additional rules which should be followed when running prize promotions ….

In addition to the general principles that advertising must be legal, decent, honest and truthful, the CAP Code requires that the following information is given to consumers before or at the time of entry into the prize promotion:

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any geographical, personal or technological restrictions (eg location, age, or the need to have access to the internet);

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http://www.out-law.com/page-6780%5B/quote%5D

Any technological restrictions such as choice of browser, proxies etc should have been clearly stated before the vote was opened. You cannot run a public competition for a prize worth thousands and make it up as you go along.

Did anyone at road.cc or Trek UK get legal advice before running this shambles? If so, get your money back.

[quote]Why couldn’t a simple, robust voting mechanism be used in the first place which would have avoided so much confusion and frustration?!!

Too many questions for what should have been a fun, exciting and fair competition.

All the right questions, IMO.