Day 7 of the First British iPhone Giveaway

Posted on 11. Nov, 2007 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Your Opinion, Please

iPhoneSurvival And the ‘negative voting’ saga continues…

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

The highest ‘voted’ entry right now in the first British iPhone giveaway is by Robin, for Battlestar Galactica, at -24 votes. Except that this entry is an update to Robin’s preceding comment which received -23 votes.

Clearly, by not checking for and preventing comment voting abuse, I made a fundamental error in my judgement of how competitors in the iPhone giveaway would use the comment voting tools.

I probably should have taken your advice earlier, Mark Watkins… I am doing now. More on that later.

So… in the final analysis, is it fair to expect competitors in a race to vote for each other? And is it fair to expect competitors in a race to resist the urge to vote down other competitors?

No and no.

I really should have seen it coming. It’s obvious now and I apologise for my naïveté. Another lesson learned.

All this makes me re-evaluate why I decided to do the iPhone giveaway in the first place.

1. To raise the profile of the re-launched Real Fresh TV site.
2. To find out people’s perceptions of watching terrestrial TV content on one of the best portable media players around.

I guess both objectives have been achieved to some degree.

However, I still have this nagging feeling that the competition hasn’t been fair.

So… the giveaway is now morphing into a more general, random one.

You know, the kind we all recognise: a random prize draw.

I will pick an entry at random on Monday 12th Novemebr at 12 noon and award that lucky person the free iPhone.

Many thanks to everyone who has entered the giveaway so far. Your suggestions have made it a genuinely interesting experience.

There’s one more thing though.

There are now two additional criteria for winning.

The winner must be willing to deliver a written review with pictures of their new iPhone to Real Fresh TV within 24 hours of receiving it.

The review must be published first on Real Fresh TV.

I had been meaning to announce this earlier but thought it better to save it till the day the winner was announced. Now I’m announcing it a day earlier.

If that floats your boat and you haven’t entered already … there’s time yet to make a random entry.

Suggest a TV show. It doesn’t matter how many votes it does or doesn’t receive.

It could be you.

Picture credit: TheApplePress.com

________________

Addendum: I decided to scrap the idea of using a simple poll to draw up a short list from the most popular TV shows suggested in the comments because the votes are clearly not reflective of people’s opinion so far.

What would you have done if it were you?

Your thoughts in the comments.

Much appreciated.

Tags: Apple, Giveaway, iPhone, iPhone competition, iPhone giveaway, O2, UK iPhone launch

14 Responses to “Day 7 of the First British iPhone Giveaway”

Imran 11 November 2007 at 10:34 pm #

Hi Chi-chi Ekweozor,

I personally would have switched the comments to “Thumbs up” only, this way all competition entries would have just received realistic “Thumbs Up” if worthy.

Also this way, competitor’s would have no means of effecting other entries, and all entries would solely be voted upon their own merit.

Hope that helps.

PS Are you in need of any gadget/web freaks!! Cause i’m a web designer, with a love of everything gadgetry.. and would love to contribute to your site..

Cheers

Imran
Chi-chi Ekweozor 12 November 2007 at 11:50 am #

@Imran:

Thanks for your comment.

What a fantastic idea. To implement it will involve prolonging the giveaway, however…

Let me explain.

Comment Voting on this site is provided via a WordPress plugin called Comment Karma.

What this means is that the votes for each comment are actually stored in the WordPress database that powers the site (and stores all the other site information).

Whilst I have done a fair bit of programming, I am not a PHP guru by any stretch of the imagination and cannot risk breaking the site by making any changes necessary to allow *only* positive comment voting to Comment Karma’s code on my own.

I have done two things:

1. I have contacted the author of the Comment Karma plugin to ask if he can make (or advise on making) the modifications necessary to the plugin to only allow ‘positive’ Comment Voting.

2. I have also contacted my web developer to ask if he is comfortable with making the changes himself.

I’ll let everyone know as soon as I hear back. The entry deadline is obviously going to be impacted by this and so I am going to extend it till the end of the week to allow enough time to have this resolved.

Oh the drama…

Will be posting a blog entry about this very shortly.

Thanks again.
Mike Watkins 12 November 2007 at 12:14 pm #

Can i say i think this competition is a big joke “now”!!

You are really losing your credibility.. I know you want the hits, but this really is not the way!

Just announce a winner for god sake!

Hope you take my advise sooner this time…
Ben 12 November 2007 at 12:43 pm #

I agree with Mike, your system for doing a competition is wrong, and I’ll tell you why!

If you look at Techcrunch or any other big blog like yours, you will see that they randomly select a winner or a editor picks a winner.

About the voting thing, in principle Imran’s idea is good, but these days you can get all your friends to vote for you, or just go to a chat room and get people to vote for you.

I really think you should adopt the most fare way, which is the random or editor model.

I know I’m not the only feels like this, if there’s others please add your comment.

Ben
Chi-chi Ekweozor 12 November 2007 at 2:06 pm #

@Ben:

Thanks for your comment.

I totally understand where you are coming from. However, Engadget and TechCrunch, both enormously popular tech websites that run regular gadget giveaways may well be choosing to reward their legions of regular readers by choosing the winner by random.

The objective of this iPhone giveaway, however, is to reward the best suggestion for a TV show to watch on an iPhone.

I am aware that people will ask other people to vote for them. That’s fine.

I am also aware that by asking other people to vote for them, existing entrants run the risk of new entrants joining the competition.

That is also fine.

I’m keeping an eye on the situation and don’t really want to see this giveaway run for much longer than the end of this week.

It is already taking up more time than I allocated to it.

It’ll be interesting to see if things change after the option to ‘only vote comments UP’ is implemented.

We’ll see.
Chi-chi Ekweozor 12 November 2007 at 2:39 pm #

@Mike ‘Mark’ Watkins:

Thanks again for your comment. You don’t need to post comments more than once to get a response.

I responded here: http://www.realfresh.tv/the-first-british-iphone-giveaway/#comment-222