Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing

Most of you reading this are aware that the first British iPhone giveaway has been beset with problems with unscrupulous online voting.

Basically, because Comment Karma, the voting system used, allowed either positive or negative votes to be made for each entry, it was possible to vote down entries as they were made.

It meant that at one stage, the ‘winning entry’ was technically the least liked TV show suggested.

To catch up on events as they unfolded, here’s a summary. You can also read all the daily updates by clicking on the iPhone tag.

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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.

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Voting now fixed!

Thanks for your patience.

All previous votes in the iPhone giveaway have been reset to 0, levelling the playing field for everyone who has entered so far.

It is now impossible to vote down entries.

So… it’s back on…

You can still enter the first British iPhone giveaway and suggest the TV show you would most like to watch on an iPhone.

Each suggestion is up for the public vote.

The TV show with the most votes at 23:59 GMT on Friday 16th November wins.

Good luck!

Image credit: Chicago White Sox Blog

Apologies to everyone who has tried voting in the iPhone giveaway since we applied last night’s patch to prevent negative voting.

As you can see, all comments that had previously received negative votes have had their (negative) vote tally reset to 0.

The few comments currently showing up with positive votes either received those before the patch was applied or had those cast to test the patch as it was being applied.

I am aware that there is currently a problem with voting and we are working very hard to fix it. We will be resetting all votes to zero as promised.

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Sincere apologies for the protracted silence, I have been really busy today attending to other Real Fresh TV business stuff.

The good news is that the plugin developer behind Comment Karma, the WordPress Comment Voting plugin in use on the site got back to me (fairly quickly, it must be said) with advice on how to make the changes necessary to allow only positive comment voting in the first British iPhone giveaway and my web developer is now working on implementing them.

You may well see the changes take effect over the next few hours.

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The second extension of the deadline for the first British iPhone Giveaway to midnight on Friday 16th November has inspired some interesting comments including this one which suggested that extending the deadline and implementing a fairer entry system would damage the competition’s credibility.

My response to that is that the competition is still open and the prize still up for grabs.

The deadline extension does not penalise anyone who has already entered.

This is an important point.

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And it is going down the wire…

The entry deadline for the first British iPhone giveaway has now been extended yet again.

This time until midnight on Friday 16th November.

The reason for this is that rather than completely abandoning the initial comment voting idea, I am following Imran’s advice on implementing a version of comment voting that only allows readers to vote other entries up.

To summarise my reply to Imran’s comment, I have done two things:

1. I have contacted the author of the ‘Comment Karma’ third party plugin used to enable Comment Voting to ask if he/she 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 post an update as soon as I hear back.

Hopefully, this will make the competition much fairer and remedy the current situation with ‘negative’ voting of comments which has marred the giveaway so far.

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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.

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The wait is over.

The iPhone went on sale yesterday at 6:02pm in the UK.

I had a chance to play with one at the Apple store in Manchester’s Arndale Centre yesterday, albeit very briefly and they are very nice.

All the reports you hear about the intuitive user interface are true…

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Photo Credit: Robert Scoble Got iPhone | bub.blicio.us

*** Breaking news ***
iPhone Giveaway entry deadline extended to 11.59AM Monday 12th November

It’s now less than 12 hours till the entry deadline for the first British iPhone giveaway and I can’t help feeling that closing the competition at 11:59AM on ‘iPhone Day UK’, over 6 hours before the iPhone goes on sale in shops is a bit of an anti-climax.

So… I’ve decided to extend the deadline by 72 hours to 11:59AM on Monday 12th November to give anyone who develops a serious case of iPhone envy over the weekend a chance to enter.

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