Thanks for your comment.

Look out for it and news of upcoming Gadget Giveaways mid-week…

I had my review drafted ready and waiting…makes me wish i had another 20 votes!

JoeAD

Thanks for your incredibly insightful comments. Much appreciated.

I’ve considered everything you said and will shortly be writing a blog post detailing the changes I am making to the way the sponsored giveaways work based on your suggestions.

In response to your first comment, the distribution of votes, admittedly widely variant is probably due to the fact that the giveaway deadline was extended several times due to early problems with negative voting.

Unfortunately, this meant that people who voted early on may have lost interest as the giveaway progressed. The problems we had with patching the voting system to prevent negative voting probably didn’t help.

And, yes, running the giveaway in two stages did cross my mind. An ‘Entry Registration’ stage followed by a ‘Voting’ stage is fairly intuitive; most public competitions are organized like this; X Factor and Big Brother being two very different examples.

The reason I didn’t implement it was that I still had to find a ‘fair’ way of selecting which entries would be voted on.

The problem is that without implementing some sort of ‘random selection’ criteria, selecting which entries are voted on eventually boils down to selecting entries based on the number of votes they receive. This brings us back to square one.

I’m thinking hard about adding a user registration system to the site for handling entries in gadget giveaways. It seems to be the most effective way to manage the giveaways themselves and combat voting fraud.

Provided I can get such a system to work without requiring people to sign up to leave comment on the blog (which is something I am firmly against), I will implement it.

The options currently available include running the giveaways in a forum-like section of the site that users need to register to use first.

Thanks again for your comments.

Stay tuned for the next blog update…

You really need to do 2 phases, a enter your competition phase and a vote phase.

I would suggest that results of the voting is kept hidden and also make each voter vote several time. i.e. each voter should be given 10 votes which they have to use up?

I would seriously look at improving the voting system for this kind of thing or just pick a winner at Random as it’s far to easy to game this kind of system.

IP address based restriction is unfair because a significant number of ISP’s put traffic through proxy’s so once one person has voted then the next person to vote from behind that ISP will be blocked.

On the converse some ISP’s do not use fixed IP addresses so it would be possible to vote, restart you internet connection vote again… etc.

Clearly use of cookies is out.

A registration system that tracked IP addresses in the background would probably be the way forward. If users had to register before they could vote or comment then you would start to build a community. The incentive to sign up would be reasonably high as users do have a chance of winning a prize.

Thanks for your comment and advice.

Apologies for the delay in responding to your email. I’ve just sent you a response.

I’m sorry that you got caught out with the vote reset on Thursday.

I’ll explain why it happened:

The voting system does not use cookies.

The reason you were unable to vote is that Comment Karma detected that you had already voted before the reset; your computer’s IP address was stored against a previous vote in the system.

For this reason, the vote button appeared greyed out when you viewed the giveaway page again.

I was concerned that this might affect people who had already voted positively for entries but had had their votes cancelled out due to the problems with malicious negative voting.

I actually offered to extend the deadline to this Friday (23rd November) to accommodate this. I put this up for the public vote because it would have been the 4th time I extended the deadline myself.
Here’s where I did it:

http://www.realfresh.tv/how-to-vote-in-the-first-british-iphone-giveaway/

As you can see, the response came back 3 votes against 0 for the deadline extension.

I will be ensuring that the voting system is foolproof for future giveaways.

I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from voting in future giveaways.

Thanks again.