Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

I would like to thanks for everybody supported PenPen! Thanks for the organizers and donators of this great contest! And special thanks to kojacker , he is hard working and organized very well.

I wish we could have a much stronger community on next comming year.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Yep!
Without Kojacker, this competition would have never existed! :)
Hip-hip-hooray for Kojacker! :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

using mobile hotspot on my N900 to get online on the Autobahn. :D (thanks by the way to the developer, used it so much in my vacation).
ok, the update arrives sooner than expected since we started the journey home sooner than expected, too... xD (logical, isn't it?!)
In this late stage of the competition I've still got some donations.
This just shows how much you support it!
Thanks for that again!

Here are the donations:
(this time I won't post the nicknames, because one asked to remain anonymous and he didn't mention his maemo username at the PayPal field, so I don't know which one of theses donations is from him...

€10,00 EUR
-€0,54 EUR
=€9,46 EUR

€20,00 EUR
-€0,73 EUR
=€19,27 EUR

€10,00 EUR
-€0,54 EUR
=€9,46 EUR

€50,00 EUR
-€2,30 EUR
=€47,70 EUR

That makes a total of (do you sit?!) €781,04 EUR !!!
How awesome is this community??

I will post the updated statistics when I've updated my sheet and calculated everything.

And by the way.
There is no need to think Nokia have decided otherwise regarding their prizes.
Nokia is very serious about this competition and made this already clear.
They btw. expect that we are very serious about this competition, too.
And I think all participants have shown that in a way I couldn't have imagined at the beginning!
kojacker, wow, I know your PM in-box must be overfilled.
You've managerd everything so great! Thanks!
All the coders, you've brought us so many new, cool apps and games (I even haven't had the time to try out everything!).
And of course our donators! Just re-read the amount of donations! And all freely given without any pressure. That is open-source at it's best!
Not to forget Nokia itself. I still have the email I sent Quim.
Nokia really showed that they really care about maemo/meego and the community!

We've shown, that the maemo community is like a brotherhood. Everyone can give something. Even if it is not money ore code (there were some really awesome ideas which brought the competition huge steps forward).

I'm still blown away!

Thanks for you all!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Thanks to all who have voted for DreamRemote. The 4th place out of 11 with such great competitors is simpy amazing.

Thanks to all voters. And those who haven't voted, what about buying a DreamBox? :D

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

and that converts to : :

£649.15
or
$1,019.56

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Wow.. we really got more than $1000 collected! Awesome! :cool:


Hmmm.. we have a tricky situation with the "Others" category, everything had been going so smoothly until the last vote! Typical!

Basically it looks like a quite large number of seemingly random and fake accounts were created and voting. In the end, qexercise won the poll from tweego by 3 votes (145 vs 142). Ive been in contact with mods and admin to see if we can figure these votes out, what amount was bogus and who it was for and, hopefully not, if any are linked to the competitors account.

Lullen, the author of qexercise, to his credit did come on and explain his side earlier, which I am grateful for. Rather than carrying the discussion on the voting thread, I thought it was best we bring it here so everyone can see.

Lullen, thank you for coming on and explaining your story - nobody is calling you a cheater. But asking a lot of people on your facebook on come on and create accounts to vote for you is flying very close to the wind here. But I appreciate your honesty.

When I wrote "Voting is strictly one vote per user" I also expected the voting section in the rules to be read, which reads:

"Voting is strictly one vote per user. The use of multiple accounts to vote, creating fake accounts to register votes, or using other illegal means to register votes is strictly prohibited and may be seen as an attempt to defraud the poll and community. Your votes may be discounted and/or your entries disqualified if judged by the contest organiser that you have done so"

Now, at the same time we have this, and is it any different to what you have done?
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...N900_tweet.png

It says
And you can start to see the difficult waters we are in :(

As I watched last night, it was a race to make as many fake accounts as possible. For example, as evidence was given to me, we were getting accounts created and voting in the last hours like:

asdplk
asdopl
asdkjl
asdiop

I didnt use the actual account names, but you get the picture.

At the moment, leave this situation with me. As I say, I am in contact with the mods, and trying to figure all this out. Unfortunately it takes time.

Also I was pm'd earlier to say social networking isn't cheating. What do you all think? Is using social networking to get votes cheating?.How about using it to ask people to create accounts on here and vote for you?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Oh, so thats how you get the votes for a twitter application? Ask for votes on twitter? .........

Those names are apprently fake and I'd say its for a disqualification of the app, except you probably can't prove that the author himself did it. He can always say someone else did it without his knowledge, although he probably asked for it.

I think using friends and social networks can't be exactly called cheating, but its unfair and should be forbidden. The idea mentioned a while back to allow only accounts created before the voting started and with at least 10 posts should be applied somehow. If it can't be limited by the voting system, it should be at least stated in the rules and checked in suspicious cases or something. (or possibly by writing a script to check automatically? not sure whats possible...)

Just the fact that the authors of QExcersize and TweeGo and maybe others asked for votes in this manner shows how unscrupulous and selfish they are.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Advertising is in my opinion okay. But asking for creating accounts especially only for voting is a bad thing.

As somewhere else said, I'm afraid that there are other possibilities to manipulate such a contest. What if a second or third placed creates a lot of fake accounty just short before the end of the contest and vote for a rival to get hin disqualified and to win himself the contest? :confused:

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

The following is just my opinion and should not taken as rule.

The Twitter account of TweeGoN900 is clearly only about TweeGo, so we can assume, that all readers of that Twitter account are user of this very program on their N900s. They've tested it for sure, otherwise they wouldn't follow/read this Twitter account.

I haven't found Lullen's Facebook page (hence I'm even not registered on Facebook), so I can't tell if he has only readers/followers which are using maemo devices.

This competition is about developing a good program (for the developer) and to vote for the favorite program (for the user).
How can a user vote for a program if he hasn't tested it?
This competition is not about "look I can collect the most votes because I'm awesome on Twitter and Facebook".

Think about it with healthy human sense.

Edit: and to threat like this is just low, very low.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

The contest itself has been completly bad organized in my hopinion.

1) lot of developers didn't know about the contest. I've talked with some friends during the contest, to ask some advice about Qt ecc... and many of them replied me: a contest? what? I didn't know anything about it!

2) lot of users didn't know about this contest! How is it possible that in a Community of thousand people, only 100-150 vote for a contest?!

3) Letting users to decide the 100% of voting result causes some problems: the most known application is voted, not the best one itself. There should have been a commission to decide at least a good percentage of the vote, for example: users count for 50% of the vote, the rest is decided by the commission.

4) again: the whole contest has been very very bad advertised. On #maemo nobody knows anything, same thing on mailing list, ecc....
You should rename this contest "Talk.Maemo.Org Coding Contest", imho.

My 2 cents.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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 :rolleyes:


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 :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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....

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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 :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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 : )

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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".

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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... :D

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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"?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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..

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

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
[ ]s

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

I am in the "others" category. And you said in a private message during the competition that I can push when the polls are closed. So I have pushed a major updates to my program since the polls closed. I am aware that if we need to make a new poll this will be very unfair if any of us have pushed updates. I have the competition version deb still on my machine so I am willing to push it to somewhere. But pushing it to extras-devel is not acceptable as all my users would suddenly get a update that would take them back to the stone ages :) I hope removing new account votes works as the second option would be messy for everyone.

I agree here. It's not 100% right way and will get rid of some real N900 users that just stopped by and voted. But at the same time maybe the only smart and doable solution.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

I think the votes done with account created after June, 20th should be removed from all categories, not only "Other" category.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

I don't have any reason to believe that the same issue happened on the desktop category where I was competing on, or any other category for this matter, but I would suggest that once we have to endure this pain that we should check all the polls to avoid this issue coming back.

Also in my opinion if we end up having to open the polls again I don't think comparing newer versions would be a big issue.... we all have had the same time and we all hope the development of these applications will continue.... To be fair we may want to give everybody some time before starting the polls again so developers can have a chance to clean up their changes and prepare a stable release.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

The reason I started this action in the "Other" thread and not any of the others (that's confusing naming) is that, through our own monitoring of voting patterns, accounts logged in on the page, and feedback, we had strong evidence that votes from dummy accounts could have affected final placings. I do not suspect the same in the other threads, which is why i have not brought this issue up in them. I am content that the final places reflected good voting in those.

Now, let's extrapolate this logically from what you are saying andy and .. i think... fcrochik. If you want to put on this restriction of only accounts before July 21st on all these other threads now, and the mods are not able to work with us on this, you will need to rerun the entire competition.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Ouh, I'm so sorry. My Application is in the Multimedia section and at the evening after the poll I uploaded a new version with all changes I made during the last week. I thought the feature freeze was only until the respective Vote was closed. :(

Was I to eager? :(

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Hi,

in my opinion, asking someone to vote
for my app, even if he isn't related to maemo
is cheating. Period. (do we really need an explicit rule?)
Did it happen here?
Come on, the voting result is just rediculous.
No other category with so many votes.
No other category, where two apps collected
so many votes in the last days.
Every time qexercise came near to tweego,
tweego got some more votes. Why that? Why did
your users wait with their votes?

But I am against the two options.
First, we can not change the rules afterwards.
It wasn't forbidden to vote for new users,
so we can not exclude them now.
Second, we can not repeat the voting after
this discussion. If one or both apps loose, they can
always say, it is just because everybody think they
cheated.

As sad as it is we have to take this result.

regards
Nicolai

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Not at all helex :) Im only replying to a point Ben made earlier, ofcourse you were welcome to update as soon as your voting had finished :) Just kinda spelling it out in "rule speak" for anyone who thought otherwise ;)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

I think we should check all the threads and I do hope we will find that we don't need to run the polls again. If any reason is found to assume foul play I think it would better to have to poll again than not trusting the results.

If there isn't a way to check than is a different subject all together.... but in that case I would ask the competitors in each categorie if they feel the need or not and the majority will decide

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

fcrochik, when you say "check" can you make clear what exactly you want to check for in the other threads. If it's a check for votes from accounts created after July 21st then Im sure all the threads will have some new voters. We need to be more specific than that.

In the case of the "other" thread, it was not just because of new voters but because what looked like a pattern of voting from new and possibly 'fake' accounts to the extent that it could have affected the final placings.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!
 

Before we rerun the poll (I think that is not a good idea).

I like this idea:
but also:
but I think rerunning the poll would be wrong.

Please calm down all, it's not the end of the world.
Decisions were made based on feedback we got. If there was no feedback we choose the best way in our opinion (think about the system of donations, no poll were made but everyone is happy).

Now we have to make the best out of it.
It is not easy because someone has decided to get an advantage, without considering the consequences for the other.

Please help us with your (constructive) opinion how to proceed.