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

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.

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

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…

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.