This was a "N900 code competition", right?

As so, I would imagine is only fair that having a N900 is a somewhat of a requirement. Of course, there is no way we can enforce/check this so we need to try something different: when the account was created it is a very good indicator but not perfect - we may actually have someone that just bought a new N900, saw about the competition and decided to create an account and vote but we probably won't find my cases.

If, at all possible, IMHO we should discard all the votes for accounts created after the voting started and see if any result changes. If does, we can just have a new vote with bigger disclaimers and rules.... Hopefully it will not...

I assume the moderators can't just release the list of votes with their respective account creation date but one of them could "run the numbers" and just tell the community the results (If possible very quickly)

Let's make sure that because some may have "tried a little too hard" to win we don't spoil the accomplishments of this competition. This was a competition organized/started by one community member, supported by the community trough donations and that managed to give us several new applications and enhancements to others.

The rules were not perfect but, like kojacker said many times, any mistakes on this competition will help make the next one even better!

What is low about it? I get pissed of when I have been sitting 3-5h EVERY day for the last two months to make my application wich I can not even use myself and then what do I hear? Please do not make it look I am the bad guy here I have never told anyone to vote more then once. What I have done is what you just read and I stand by my word.

Well...A quick reply...
A developer wants all users of his application to get updates as soon as possible, so he creates a Twitter channel for it. For him, it doesn't look like cheating.
A human develops interesting application for himself and wants to show it to his friends. Mentioning that it takes part in contest and inviting them to vote doesn't resemble a nefarious action.
In fact, I suppose that others also mentioned their applications to friends: it just happened that either quantity of possible users was smaller or the application was less enchanting or the developer was taciturn...

Yes, the rules could have specified that each voter should have used the application he votes for on an N900. But they haven't.
Yes, the rules could have specified that each voter should have registered some time before competition or posted not less than 5/10 messages or received not less that 2/5 thanks. But they haven't.
Yes, the rules could have specified that each link to the competition from an external website (like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia) should not be part of advertisement like "vote for this application here" but should be completely neutral. But they haven't.

Yes, the contest should have been better advertised. The maemo.org homepage could have included large headline linking to it, for instance. But it wasn't.

And guess what? I'm sure there were some cases when developer of one of competing apps gave link to the contest, and the reader of the link registered and voted for app of another developer.

"How can a user vote for a program if he hasn't tested it?"
By screenshots. By descriptions of other users. Imagine your N900 is broken or hasn't yet arrived from the shop or isn't bought yet. But yes, it's a shadowy ground.

"and to threat like this is just low, very low."
It's not a threat, it's a response of grieved and angered person. Imagine: you developed a brilliant application; you won trip to Conference; you haven't cheated at all to win; and then it's said there is a possibility you are disqualified!

"I think using friends and social networks can't be exactly called cheating, but its unfair and should be forbidden."
Well, where would the votes come from? The thread would be visited mostly by developers of site talk.maemo.org, not by usual users of N900.

"lot of developers didn't know about the contest."
Sad, sad...

"lot of users didn't know about this contest!"

Well, not all users of talk.maemo.org visit
OS / Platform > Development >
frequently enough to see it.
And not all users of N900 have visited talk.maemo.org

Before next competition administrator could send PMs to all users of talk.maemo.org.

"The rules were not perfect but, like kojacker said many times, any mistakes on this competition will help make the next one even better!"

I concur.

If you would have read correctly, I never judged your action of advertising your app. I even don't know exactly what you've done on your Facebook page (as I said, I haven't even found it).
I just said that threating (is that the right word? google translate says so) like "if you say something bad about me you will not get my app because I have the force to do so" is just not the right way of communication.
The community decided once in a similar cas (maemo extras QA anyone?) and it will decide again.
I admire that you were so quick to post your version of the story. And I believe that it wasn't your intention to cheat anyone.
The community have now decide about how to proceed further.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not against you or your app, I haven't even voted for any of the apps. I thought it would be wrong since I'm helping a little bit to organize everything here. But there is no rule prohibiting me to vote. It's just my point of view preventing me.
And likewise there can be users who have an other point of view than you. They respect yours and you should respect them.
All have to decide later how to proceed.

You can't test a program based on screenshots and voices of others. That is not testing. Testing means to try something out and build an opinion based on that test.

I have not time to write a proper answer now but I wanted to post a short reply. Sorry if I overreacted in the last post. I did not mean it like that, what I ment is that I do not earn anything on keeping this application getting better so IF I keep on doing it is because 1. I want to become a better programmer 2. to please the community to have a (hopefully) great app to help them when they are doing exercises. So if the community do threats me bad the only reason left is for me to become a better programmer and I can not keep up the programming without a buddy to test it for bugs and such(Thanks again Andrew_85 for all the awesome work). In fact I have not tested my own app since 28 june and that should make me not able to vote, right?

PS. When you develop programs in companies you do not start with writing code. One often used design-test is to do everything on paper and ask a lot of people what they think about it. I guess you know this so I will not write more about it.

Thanks all for the feedback. Andy, you'll have your chance to get another dig in about the organisation of the competition at the end of the competition, I promise! By the way, how did contacting Planet Maemo about the competition go? It's the one thing I asked you to do, Im sure you were able to organise that


I'd like everyone to help concentrate on this one issue. On my behalf, Im trying to be as open back to you as I can. Also we got this far working together, we need one last push as a collective to get over this hurdle

I'll tell you what I have done and the status of play.

I have been monitoring all the threads as best I can, as a normal user I do not have the mod or admin privileges to see any deeper than the rest of you 'normal' folks. Im reliant on the maemo.org team to assist us on the "guts" of the competition. They have been very helpful so far, there have been a lot of issues we needed to work together on to get this far that many people are not aware of.

I had my suspicions about voting activity a few days ago and contacted Reggie and Texrat for some help on forum rules regarding duplicate accounts and ip checks. At this time I am awaiting a reply or read receipt for those contacts.

Last night before the "Other" voting thread had ended I contacted sjgadsby, Reggie, and Texrat for help on various investigations with the thread voting. sjgadsby got back very quickly and advised he can't see any more about who voted who on the poll than we can, but that Reggie might be able to. I have sent a further message to Reggie today to see if he can reveal the thread voters ids amongst other help.

Infact, here's a list of the last few pms Ive sent awaiting a read receipt.

Now, that is the state of play and I want all of you to help me sort this mess out! As I say, please forget about all the other stuff for the moment and we'll go back to that afterwards, please concentrate on this

We need a way forward, so let me throw some solutions out to you.

• I have asked Reggie if we can remove the anonymity of the poll. If he can and agrees to do so, how about we discount all new accounts and say accounts with posts less than 5 from the total votes? This way we dont need to run the poll again. There are hundreds of accounts, are you willing to help me sift through them all to do that?
  
• Here's another possible solution. Let's say we are in a situation where maemo mod team or unwilling or just unable to help remove anonymity or ip checks. Then I would propose we run the poll again, but this time we'll not make it private - everyone will be able to see who voted for who - and we'll make it clear that only accounts created before yesterdays closing date plus have a minimum of 5 votes will be counted in the final tally.

I think both of these solutions are better than the situation we are in now, and Im always open to other suggestions from you... so bring them forward please

I completely missed it

I usually read emails, but I don't read ALL forum threads/messages. Man, this thread is already over 50 pages, how do you think I can read it all? t.m.o. has always had too much noise for my tastes and this is one of the reasons I don't use it so much, but this is another story....

Not to worry, I do appreciate you writing about the competition in your own blog

Yep I do have a list of blogs etc that have mentioned the comp But as you recognise yourself, there's a whole load of posts on this thread plus there's the wiki edits, the emails and pms you dont see plus logistics and donations and... well you get the picture. It's a team comp, and it's testament to everyone that we pushed it so far to this point. We're at the finishing line and we've done ok, we got a problem now though so let's all pull together and get it finished

As a participant, andy, Id appreciate your thoughts on how you would like this situation handled. And that goes for everyone else too

Hello everyone,

I would like to say a few words about what is happening.

I created the twitter account to let users informed about the new releases and let them updated about what is going in the development process. From twitter, I receive almost all of the bug reports and feature requests for the application, which I find very helpful. I am always searching for the application name there to check what users are saying and testing, it is awesome to see that, it helps a lot on the development and improvement.

So it's not valid to account for votes from users that actually use the application and help to improve it? If it's not, I apologize, because I didn't know it was a developer only competition.

I find very disappointing that Lullen said that, I am sure he didn't really mean it because he was just angry when he wrote it. We are an open source community, it doesn't matter if there's a prize or not, I am sure everyone is here because you like developing and/or to help the community to get even better.

But anyway, Mikhail and I set a PM to kojacker because we were watching the poll in the last hours and it was exciting, but unfortunately we saw some weird user names like kojacker said earlier, and we just wanted to know if they were voting for the applications.

And another thing, I don't appreciate that some users were criticizing the application, saying it shouldn't be getting many votes just because it's a client and there is no use at all. Let me tell you something, I don't use it either, I don't even have a twitter account. I develop it for the community because I know there are a lot of people that use twitter. And as long as there are people to use I'm still gonna keep contributing and developing new ones.

I am sure this competition contributed a lot for the community and I want to thank kojacker for everything he did, because I know trying to organize something like this is very hard.

Keep up the good work everyone, I saw some great applications here.

Both options sound good to me. I think it is important that we quickly clear out this issue so it doesn't become ALL that people talk about when they think about this competition.

I really wouldn't worry much about the "# of posts" but would concentrate on only counting votes for accounts created before the 21st July.