As I am on the "users" end of this competition I thought I would submit my opinion,
I think that what these guys did was legal, but unfair for everyone else. This is a quite a small forum but its also one of the most active so when a competition like this comes along you wouldn't have thought anyone would need "advertise" for more votes.
Anyway its all just a sticky situation and I think kojacker has the right idea

So thats my vote lets redo the poll, its the only way for everyone to be happy.

Edit: I also forgot to say congrats to the winners and well done to anyone else who entered, and as a first competition I think it went quite well and you should all be proud no-matter what the result

I wish the problem can be solved by solution 1. I don't prefer to run the polling again. What happen if people complains for the polling result again? It is very easy to find a way to complain for the result. It is impossible to have a rule which is totally fair , and everybody 100% accept it.

Moreover, if run two polling in a short time , user may not realize that a new polling is started , they would just think that they have already voted and ignore the thread.

At least , I don't really want to have a feature freeze period... Although I agreed feature freeze when the problem it is raised during voting , it is because not everybody know , it is unfair. In case that it need to run the poll again , I really want to remove the restriction , as it is a programming contest.

p.s I agree with fcrochik that it should focus on registration date instead of number of post.

First option seems reasonable and fair. But checking all that accounts by hands would be very sisyphean labour. Filtering newly created accounts out from poll results should be feasible on forum database level. Few SQL queries and we should know *true* results. Of course this needs forum admins to be involved. Could that be arranged?

I would also say option 1 is the best. Running the poll again will force us to keep this discussion another week. I'm willing to help if I'm able to.

Someone said earlier in this thread that the voting should be different like admins 50% and the votes is 50%. I really think it should be like that as the current system is not really right. If something does not changes and we redo the poll(no one have broken the rules from wiki) I will myself distqualify myself as I will just be angry. If you should redo it, do it the right way! I do not think we care if this poll takes one more month.

Well right now I am on the beer so sorry for the bad grammar : )

with 50 and 50% I did mean there should be a commission, composed by at least 10 people who should test ALL the application before voting them.

Then, about the forum's users voting, there should be some restriction in particular no people subscribed after ***** date, minumum of x forum posts ecc.... this to avoid "cheating".

To put this post into context, I'm at 4th place in the "others" category (if I read the poll right) at the moment with DropN900. I don't have any ambitions to climb up higher or get any money/trips out of this. I'm happy I got that high up with 2 weeks of development and a crazy idea about a dropbox client for the N900 Only reason I entered the competition was that someone suggested it to me on my app thread.

Thoughts
Reading this http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=526 is kind of unfortunate. I'm not trying to be rude to anyone. But I would think anyone would understand that asking random people to generate accounts to cast votes for their app is morally very wrong if not explicitly against the competition rules. The idea is that people get to know about the apps, at least read the information about all of them and then cast an informed vote what they think is best the best app.

Seems that this became a competition who has best viral marketing or most friends/contacts to generate votes via new accounts without looking at the other apps. Then it's not anymore about who coded the best app. Granted the two top apps are excellent and I gave my vote for TweeGo also.

This is the only advertisement I did for my app, this was on my applications thread here. I did not have the heart to even tell my talk.maemo users to vote for me, just wanted them to check the thread out. But hey thats just me...

For the solution
Note that if you make the polls again the apps are not anymore the same. I got instructed not to update my app during the competition and I didnt, I pushed late night at friday. But now that I have pushed how do people get the "competition" version back for testing to make a new vote? I have the deb in store on my machine but this would be very troublesome for everyone to push their old versions back to some repo if they have updated. I added a punch of features on friday and my app is now 10x better than it was before :P So putting that would be unfair to the new poll would be very unfair imo.

I would prefer the option where you just eliminate the new accounts made during this competition with 0 posts on this forum or maybe the 1 posters (with new accounts) on the voting thread also.

The point

• Asking your app users to cast a vote for you - Nothing against this
• Asking your app users to cast a vote for you by generating a new account to do so - Kind of shady I guess
• Asking your app users to cast a vote for you and then they come and generate multiple accounts - Not the developers fault, really. Should just eliminate these

This was not a "only developers and existing talk.maemo users can cast their votes!" thing. Any N900 user should have their say, even if its a new account. Making multiple accounts is wrong as said in the rules and they should be removed. But how do you see who from the new accounts made during the contest has a N900 and how just came just because someone asked them to make an account and hit a certain button? Tricky stuff indeed...

Edit: I think I would have gotten +10-50 votes if I blasted same kind of adverts to facebook/irc/mailing lists/irl... just saying

Edit 2: Crazy idea for the next poll. Make a voting app for the N900. This way we know everyone who votes has the device and has had the ability to check out the apps out. /me shuts up now...

Any possibility to get a "fair" result is gone. There is no possibility to re-create anything close to the pre-voting setting. For anyone. A new poll would only generate more nitpicking and even more of the tedious " ... but the rules didn't state ...".

This competition was created to pit new applications and their developers against each other with the added bonus of getting new applications and generating more interest in developing for the N900.

Thus, the applications are to be compared, and a winner shouldn't be picked based on a poll where accounts were only created to cast a vote without comparing the applications.

So, remove the votes from accounts that were created after the competition started. This might very well remove votes from people that actually did compare the applications, but that's always a risk when votes are to be recounted, no matter what method is used.

Out of curiosity, has anyone checked the other polls for similar "gaming"?

Taking feedback from the last few pages, I would like to propose the following way forward:

Plan A: There is a willingness to use the votes already cast. So I will continue to work with the moderation team with a view to two things.
1) to get a list of voters and discount votes from all accounts created after July 21st.
2) to check for any votes from duplicate accounts created by the developers.

What is left is the final vote.

As I have already contacted the mods to start this process, I propose if for any reason it is not possible to get those details or if we have not heard back from the mods by lunch time Monday, then we will go onto plan B.

Plan B: We will re-run the poll for the “Other” category with a new thread and poll. There will be the following new restrictions on the poll.
1) The poll will run 7 days, from Monday lunch time (UK) to the following Monday. This will tie in with when Quim is back from holidays.
2) voters will not be anonymous
3) any votes from accounts created after July 21st will be discounted from the final totals.

It was also made a rule that there would be a code freeze on projects until after competition voting. I propose we lift this restriction on those projects not involved with the “Other” thread to allow these developers to continue releasing updates.

I propose this as a middle ground proposal, I understand there will be feelings on either side but I feel it's 'fair'. I will take 10 “thanks” on this post as a broad general acceptance. Also, if there anyone who just cannot get behind this proposal, please speak up now.

Edit: Apologies, I wrote June 21st when I meant July 21st..

Hi everybody!

I am close of TweeGo developers. Our intent is to contribute with Maemo community with several open applications. Of course all the development team had a great expectation to be recognized by a competition like this. But I say to them that we do not need to be under such a polemic. Your work is already recognized by reaching the first place in downloads in garage and by receiving good comments from many users through the Internet.
Congratulations not for the second place in this forum, but for the work of quality you have done with TweeGo itself. Please, go on with its development with the same energy and dedication.
About the proposed solutions for this competition...ok
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