[CONTEST] Return of the Classic Pirates - Vote Counting

[thewatchman]

4 hours ago, Horation said:

This kind of stuff is why having a few qualified judges is a better idea. I say remove MyFirstMoc from the contest so no else ever gets the clever idea to ask their followers to vote for them in such a way.

I kind of agree with this.

 Entering this and having fun / being inspired by everyone’s building was more than enough reward for me, but I think ultimately whoever is offering the prize should be the judge, or trusted, known judges.

[Mister Phes]

9 hours ago, Horation said:

This kind of stuff is why having a few qualified judges is a better idea.

And how do we find and appoint qualified judges?

12 hours ago, Rogue Redcoat said:

feel ban them from Eurobricks, but that's not my choice, do others have a say on this matter? 

Yes, currently it's a discussion open to everyone... as you can see we are discussing it right now.

12 hours ago, Ardelon said:

It seems to me that some people are too quick to assume fraud - MyFirstMOC is a Hungarian FOL with a following

Yes, and he did advertise his entries on social media... so therefore it's not unreasonable some of his followers may have voted that day.

12 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

This is a discussion forum and users that only register to vote and then are never seen again are the most useless thing on earth

Yes, you are correct. 

12 hours ago, Ardelon said:

I would add my voice to those saying that there should be a rule barring members who joined after the start of a contest from voting. I understand that not having this rule was meant to lower the entry barrier for potential engaged new members who would stick around, but I think the sour taste of situations like this outweighs any such benefit.

The reason the for the low entry barrier was primarily to observe the outcome.

So having observed, I agree the negative has outweighed the benefit, so in the future voting requirements will be more stringent.

[Yperio_Bricks]

Every member of the jury then could award points like a Formula 1 GP spectacle Today we are in Belgium for the GP of Spa where 10,6,4,3,2,1 points will be awarded. Moc X still in the lead but the undulating terrain makes it hard for the imperial ship to gain ground on its competitors

[F1stzz]

1 hour ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

Every member of the jury then could award points [...]

I'd say jury are only needed to ensure the compliance of MOCs with the established rules as well as to ensure the voting rules are being strictly followed. Overall, some of the troubles occurred during the contest are a direct consequence of the fact that rules were created in a hurry, which allowed for quite a number of loopholes. That's a wide topic, tbh, all I have to say is we, as a community, are about to dive into a big discussion after the conclusion of this event.

[Yperio_Bricks]

35 minutes ago, F1stzz said:

I'd say jury are only needed to ensure the compliance of MOCs with the established rules as well as to ensure the voting rules are being strictly followed. Overall, some of the troubles occurred during the contest are a direct consequence of the fact that rules were created in a hurry, which allowed for quite a number of loopholes. That's a wide topic, tbh, all I have to say is we, as a community, are about to dive into a big discussion after the conclusion of this event.

I didn't want to advocate for or against a jury. I should have expressed myself better  Just that fun idea crossed my mind that even the voting process can be fun and a spectacle

[F1stzz]

34 minutes ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

I didn't want to advocate for or against a jury. I should have expressed myself better  Just that fun idea crossed my mind that even the voting process can be fun and a spectacle

No problems, mate, nothing wrong with what you've suggested   It's just that while talking about the concept of having juries in general I feel like we should focus more around the fact that for a majority of contest's duration there was basically little to no control over the actual compliance with the rules as well as the rules themselves were not detailed & thought through enough to prevent some troubles we're dealing with from happening. We're yet to see how the voting was affected by these issues in fact, I'm sure we all are about to have a deep convo on it later, cuz some of the points I'm about to bring up, imo, are definitely worth being mentioned & payed attention to — such as, let's say, "copyright" stuff, which is there in the rules for Creative Critiques, but is nowhere to be found in the rules of a contest itself. And even tho it's mentioned for Creative Critiques — I don't think it was actually closely followed by most of participants themselves, as well as, again, there was no actual control over the compliance & all. So yeah, I'd say the feedback on the event is going to be quite meaningful for the future contests.

[Mister Phes]

1 hour ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

even the voting process can be fun and a spectacle

Now you're catching on...

[Yperio_Bricks]

13 minutes ago, Mister Phes said:

Now you're catching on...

Is that good or bad? With spectacle i meant the formula 1 scores idea, not chaos

[Mister Phes]

2 minutes ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

Is that good or bad? With spectacle i meant the formula 1 scores idea, not chaos

We can have both...

[Yoggington]

To play devil's advocate on MFM's behalf. Nothing here proves the user created the extra accounts themself.

A shared IP address just shows they are coming from the same location - Maybe their partner/housemate/brother created an account and voted.

They had a flurry of new accounts sign up and vote for them - Maybe they were at their local Hungarian LUG meeting and mentioned the competition.

I posted my entry in my WIP thread over on the Irish LUG forum, and encouraged people to come on over, check out the entries & cast some votes - was that also illegal?

As there was no requirement in the rules to have a Eurobricks Account before the competition started, then anything so far is not actually against the rules of the competition. It doesn't look like it'll impact the result, so it's just a lesson learned for next time about tightening up the rules.

Edited September 15 by Yoggington
grammar

[Yperio_Bricks]

Or it was a public library computer in town, where more than one afol interested in this contest created an account to vote not knowing others used the very same computer to vote before /s

So these adult people, i assume they are adults, are so very interested in pirates stuff, would create an account, vote and then we will never see them again? How does that help anyone? It only causes bad blood as you can see. Even if something is not against the rules, one should know by common sense that this is not ok. Now rules have to be altered for the future, maybe a jury has to be installed and at the end everyone will be pissed.

Read the newsblog comment sections when again and again Taylor Swift related moc ideas are voted into review by an fan army. So much bad blood.

[F1stzz]

1 hour ago, Yoggington said:

I posted my entry in my WIP thread over on the Irish LUG forum, and encouraged people to come on over, check out the entries & cast some votes - was that also illegal?

Nope, in fact the FAQ section of the rules states as follows:

Quote

Can I share my entries on social media?

Yes. The more people you can attract to your entry, the more votes you're likely to get.

Be sure to tag @ClassicPirates and use the #ClassicPiratesReturn hashtag for easy identification of your entries [...]

So yup, the promotion of entries on various social medias is allowed for the creators of said entires. Then again, there's nothing in the rules stating it's forbidden for others to promote someone else's entries, which could also be taken as a legal loophole 

[Horation]

On 9/15/2023 at 9:56 AM, Yperio_Bricks said:

Read the newsblog comment sections when again and again Taylor Swift related moc ideas are voted into review by an fan army. So much bad blood.

Indeed, same problem here. And since we're on the topic of future voting systems, I'd suggest maybe make it an elimination tournament, for example, 3 judges rank every entry.

Let`s say there are 4 entries (named E1, E2, E3 and E4)

The judges give the following rankings 

A : E1,E4,E2,E3

B:E3,E2,E4,E1

C:E1,E3,E2,E4

The entries are randomly paired, and then you have a bracket :

E1 vs E4   Results : 2-1

E2 vs E3 Results : 1-2

Finals : E1 vs E3 Results : 2-1 

You can do this for as many entries as you want, and you can release the results as quickly or as slowly as you want (so you can create some excitement), and it gives really fun results with very few judges (for example, this would theoretically work ∀ n entries | n ∈ ℕ , you simply need to  give a couple of byes into an upper round to some entries, say those that come from newer users.) 

I believe this would also guarantee that the condorcet winner is the correct winner, but I'll check with the math department later...

On second thought (and after further analysis), that statement above now seems false...

Edited September 17 by Horation
corrected the issue

[MstrOfPppts]

I'd say there's nothing wrong with the current voting system, as long as voting is restricted from the new or even barely active accounts. While the brackets idea might look fun, I think there's too much engagement expected from the voters. I think that towards the end, there would be less and less activity and winners would be decided by just a couple of votes in the end. There was already skepticism in allowing to vote for five entries rather than just three for people not taking the time. Imagine them having to vote multiple times and for all the pairs to come through 40+ entries in both categories ...

At first I was a bit skeptical about the long voting period, but since the votes are still coming in, I'd say it was a good call. Also I think that over 50 voters, even if with a few suspicious ones, is a huge success for the competitions around here. And I think that the amount and diversity of votes is about right to say that we will get fair enough results.

[Horation]

Well the idea of that system is to have a small jury instead of a large group of voters, since this would make calculations easier to do and would encourage users to join so they can create a build and not so they can vote, hence avoiding the problems around large groups of people voting...

[zinnn]

To add to the discussion: in my opinion, for any future contests there should be a rule that anyone with at least 10 posts is eligible to vote. I wouldn’t ban new members who registered after the competition started from voting, but they’d have to prove they’re here as genuine fans of the theme, not one-offs.

Also, personally, I see no harm in promoting your builds on your social media, I thinks that’s something impossible to control anyway.

[Rogue Redcoat]

38 minutes ago, zinnn said:

To add to the discussion: in my opinion, for any future contests there should be a rule that anyone with at least 10 posts is eligible to vote. I wouldn’t ban new members who registered after the competition started from voting, but they’d have to prove they’re here as genuine fans of the theme, not one-offs.

Also, personally, I see no harm in promoting your builds on your social media, I thinks that’s something impossible to control anyway.

Exactly my thoughts 

[Aanchir]

1 hour ago, zinnn said:

Also, personally, I see no harm in promoting your builds on your social media, I thinks that’s something impossible to control anyway.

Agreed. Plus, sharing links to your contest entries on social media also helps to promote the contest in general, which is a great way to either bring new users to the forum for future contests and/or to show inactive users that this place is still alive and kicking! It's only a problem if you encourage people to join the forum JUST to vote for your entries (though of course, that doesn't answer the question of what to do if somebody's fans on social media decide to do so on their own initiative, which is a legitimate debate to have).

1 hour ago, zinnn said:

To add to the discussion: in my opinion, for any future contests there should be a rule that anyone with at least 10 posts is eligible to vote. I wouldn’t ban new members who registered after the competition started from voting, but they’d have to prove they’re here as genuine fans of the theme, not one-offs.

Yeah, 10 posts sounds like it would be a reasonable minimum requirement. I feel like I've seen similar rules in contests on other forums.

[Mister Phes]

@TomSkippy - you've only voted for two Mini Set entries.

The requirement is a minimum of 3 votes in each category for your vote to be valid.

Please correct this before voting closes or your vote won't be counted.

[Mister Phes]

@Glowboy - you've only voted for one Mini Set entry.

The requirement is a minimum of 3 votes in each category for your vote to be valid.

Please correct this before voting closes or your vote won't be counted.

[Mister Phes]

VOTE COUNTING

Based on  @Yoggington's earlier spreadsheet, I've continued to count votes and my tally can be found via this Google Drive link.

Feel free to double check and challenge these counts - you've got one week.

[durazno33]

On 9/14/2023 at 9:46 PM, thewatchman said:

I kind of agree with this.

 Entering this and having fun / being inspired by everyone’s building was more than enough reward for me, but I think ultimately whoever is offering the prize should be the judge, or trusted, known judges.

I've participated in contests with voting and contests with "qualified judges". Both have their pro's and cons.  Voting can end up as a popularity contest of the creator. A person with the most friends can win. However, barring that, generally builds that appeal to a lot of people get a lot of votes.

The "qualified judges" approach can lead to more objective selections based on a rubric of difficulty, creativity, and other qualities. However, judges are often chosen from  winners of previous contests and end with judges voting for which ever build adheres to their preferred buildings style or other currently popular building styles (cough greebling) and over emphasizes "clever" part usage. There also can be forms of buddy-buddy problems when judges overvalue entries from important members of the Lego community.  

Like I said, neither is perfect. It depends on the integrity of the community or the judges. Maybe a combination of the two?

A system where a larger group of qualified judges rank order the builds and then the community votes on which of the judge's result set they agree with more. If the judge's score/review receives low marks, it's importance is ranked lower in importance than other reviews. Winners would then be selected based on general selection by a judge and popular selection of that judge by the community.  It would be a more complicated but might balance out the two approaches. 

 

 

[Yperio_Bricks]

49 minutes ago, durazno33 said:

The "qualified judges" approach can lead to more objective selections based on a rubric of difficulty, creativity, and other qualities. However, judges are often chosen from  winners of previous contests and end with judges voting for which ever build adheres to their preferred buildings style or other currently popular building styles (cough greebling) and over emphasizes "clever" part usage. There also can be forms of buddy-buddy problems when judges overvalue entries from important members of the Lego community. 

Haha yeah, i know exactly what you mean (from my observation of the german afol scene). It's a pest

[The Reader]

11 hours ago, Mister Phes said:

VOTE COUNTING

Based on  @Yoggington's earlier spreadsheet, I've continued to count votes and my tally can be found via this Google Drive link.

Feel free to double check and challenge these counts - you've got one week.

Thanks! My votes have been counted correctly.

[Jack Sassy]

13 hours ago, Mister Phes said:

Feel free to double check and challenge these counts - you've got one week.

Aye, me votes are all in place, however, I believe the first spreadsheet (or be this the same one? ) that I checked included few more votes for me entry.