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breezergood.
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February 14, 2014 at 2:01 am #20692
Gkam84
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?
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FatAndFurious
GoingRoundInCycles wrote:And
GoingRoundInCycles wrote:And while this disaster unfolds, still not a public word to explain the inexplicable from the road.cc team ….CompetitionRules wrote:No correspondence will be entered into.True to their word.
Darren C
My entry has only ‘lost’
My entry has only ‘lost’ about 6 votes! But I’m still in 13th. :”(notfastenough
I am now officially glad that
I am now officially glad that I didnt get round to submitting an entry.GoingRoundInCycles
jason.timothy.jones
jason.timothy.jones wrote:This has gone past being sad now.Apparently it is about the bike
Apparently not. It is about Trek marketing the whole Project One process to women in the run up to Spring when traditionally people buy new bikes, with the help of road.cc.
jason.timothy.jones
This has gone past being sad
This has gone past being sad now.Apparently it is about the bike
Well, well, well …
It gets
Well, well, well …It gets more and more interesting. I conducted a little experiment by voting an equal number of times for myself and for Juliet Elliott using exactly the same method.
My votes have just been deleted and the votes for Juliet remain safe and sound ….
Draw your own conclusions, but the next time I carry out this experiment it will be in the presence of my lawyer.
As far as I can tell, one
As far as I can tell, one person in the Top 4 at that time had no votes removed at all. Her supporters must all be saints ….. 8|Genuinely … that was my last word. No really. 🙂
Gkam84 wrote:So I just had a
Gkam84 wrote:So I just had a look this morning, it is a two horse race….between one which had dodgy votes and one which had dodgy votes….Is this still a competition?
Is anybody clearer about what exactly is meant by “vote doping”?
Is anyone from road.cc or Trek UK out there? :H
Gkam84, I take it back. I think you were right all along that there was only ever supposed to be one winner of this ‘competition’ and when you understand that, and understand the motivation, everything from the selection process for the shortlist onwards makes perfect sense.
I would love to say more but as I am sure my lawyer will advise me, “No correspondence will be entered into” on this subject until the end of the ‘competition’.
Anonymous
Gkam84 wrote:So I just had a
Gkam84 wrote:So I just had a look this morning, it is a two horse race….between one which had dodgy votes and one which had dodgy votes….Yeah, putting aside the morals of multiple voting for a moment, it’s strange how most people had a huge number of votes removed and yet others find themselves 1000 votes ahead!
So I just had a look this
So I just had a look this morning, it is a two horse race….between one which had dodgy votes and one which had dodgy votes….si.brown wrote:Having said
si.brown wrote: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.
None of the contestants are to blame for this fiasco. The rules were not thought about and defined clearly enough to promote fair play. The obvious intention was to generate multiple hits but the consequences of this free-for-all should have been foreseen by any Internet savvy professional.
As people raised concerns about what is acceptable, no clarifications were forthcoming.
Now it is announced on Trek UK Twitter yesterday?!!! that ‘vote dopers’ have been banned but no announcement on this site and in the last 15 minutes I have cast a vote for all twenty five bikes ….
Unless, I see significant voting action, I am calling a ceasefire tonight. My blood pressure must be through the roof. Hopefully things will have been clarified by the morning, although I shan’t hold my breath … X(
As somebody else who made it
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.
Quote:I just had to speak up,
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.
I will reiterate again,
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….
Gkam84 wrote:Oh don’t tell me
Gkam84 wrote:Oh don’t tell me it was one of my tweets? 👿 :)):H
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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