I didn't follow closely the effort, and AFAIK have no moderating rights so I can only nod in approval I would have been maybe a bit happier if we could have leveraged maemo.org infrastructure for this (to help avoid potential abuse and improve transparency), but hey - maybe next time. As for Nokia, sure, I even recall Quim offering something (if not, file this under my sleeping at 31C degrades long term memory category).

PS. Blog blog blog. Also, would probably be worth a good spot in the Maemo Weekly.

Sorry, I'm way behind on PMs and emails... best place for stuff like this is public anyway.

Nokia is informed.
In fact Nokia is sponsoring the greatest part of the prizes - the six flights and accommodation to the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin, Ireland.

Hi council, Im reaching out for some help and advice on one of our voting threads in which we detected some suspicious voting patterns, and also what we think might be fake/duplicate accounts created specifically for voting.

The poll thread is for the "Other" category. There are only 3 votes separating winning from second place, so it's quite important for fairness that we do our best to remove any fraudulent votes. There's a little bit of further info in this post.

When I created the poll, I created it anonymous which now makes it harder still to figure this out. Ofcourse, I don't have any site privileges to see a full list of accounts that voted. Is there someone on the mod/web site admin side we can work with to either get the poll opened so we can see who voted, or who can provide a list of accounts which voted and who they voted for, or even to return totals after ip duplicates/accounts created after a certain date are removed from the results? I also have a sample list of accounts that are suspicious I could provide if it helps.

I understand Reggie might be the person to work with. I've contacted him previously on 26th, 30th, and 31st but have not received a response as yet. If he's not available for a period of time would there be someone else we can work with?

As you may know, we have collected over $1000 of donations from Maemo.org members and I want us to work together to make sure each $1 is awarded as fairly as possible. Thanks for your help.

Yes, Reggie is the guy you want to talk to, I have written him an email, too, but it's not impossible he's on the go, vacation or constrained in other ways in RL, I'll try and dig up someone with supermoderator and admin rights (but don't stop your efforts to resolve it, I'm just a parallel thread).

EDIT:

As for my personal take on the matter: Social networking is not nice, but I would not consider it cheating (as it just means raising awareness - if one wanted a strictly technical judgement, you should have asked a predermined panel of developers and users, not a general vote). Registering fake accounts to boost votes OTOH is something I find thorougly unacceptable (in fact, if there is proof that it was done by the contestant himself, I would find that a disqualifying matter).

I wish we used (and propose we do if the contest is repeated) the Council voting mechanism for this.

Heh

Still, for a first timer, I think everything went quite smooth...

Unfortunately I can't help on this other than to repeat what's been said (ie, no help). Hopefully Reggie can address soon. I'm with atilla77 on social networking; that's a skill and no harm done IMO as long as it's strictly legit. Duplicate accounts here are forbidden outright, however, so action should be taken where that's the case.

EDIT: I also agree that an external, more robust voting mechanism should be used. One with tokens.

Sorry, I've been seeing the messages but can't do anything since I didn't have the right tools to run the queries since I was out of town.

I've generated the raw data direct from the database with all the members who voted, their IP addresses, join date, post counts, etc. From what I see, if the results are adjusted, the results are quite different from the final poll results.

Anyway, I have emailed the data to the council (attila77), and I'll have them look at it. kojacker, feel free to contact attila77 directly.

FYI, I can't post the raw data publicly since it contains sensitive info like IP addresses.

The plot thickens...

What plot is that?