British iPhone Giveaway: Summary of Events
Posted on 16. Nov, 2007 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Trends
Here’s a summary of events as they unfolded, unscrupulous votes and all, in the social media soap opera that is the first British iPhone giveaway. You can also read all the daily updates by clicking on the iPhone tag.
In essence, because the voting system used, Comment Karma, allowed either positive or negative votes to be made for each entry, it was possible to vote down entries as they were made.
This meant that as the giveaway progressed, most entries accumulated negative votes because some entrants(?) were maliciously voting them down.
As the second deadline for the competition approached (I first extended it to allow people to enter up till the Monday after the original deadline: iPhone launch day UK), I initially decided to scrap the voting idea.
The plan was to choose a random winner from the comments entered, much like Engadget and TechCrunch do with their giveaways.
However, Imran pointed out that it would be wiser to only enable positive votes for each comment.
I thought this was a brilliant idea since the rationale behind running the giveaway was to reward the TV show with the most votes and decided to implement it.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I had not foreseen that entrants into the giveaway would deny others a fair chance of winning by voting down entries as they were made.
The idea of modifying Comment Karma, which comes with both ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ buttons as standard, never occurred to me.
I would have set up the system like it is now to prevent unscrupulous voting.
Anyway, I under-estimated how long it would take me to modify Comment Karma to allow only positive votes.
The first attempt to modify the plugin on early Wednesday morning ended up breaking the voting system. The voting system was eventually successfully patched on late Thursday afternoon.
Comment Karma is still working but not quite as the plugin author intended.
Return to post explaining how to vote in the iPhone giveaway.
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