Project One Clarification

Gkam84

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 ….

Gkam84

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.

You can keep on all you like.
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

Quote:So, some select

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:

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:

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.

GoingRoundInCycles

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.

Brendan are you still playing
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.