"We am have photo finish!"
It’s midnight here in California — March 1st. Which means the Secret Room’s first contest is over. The rules were simple: The tone secret with the highest user rating earns it author a $1,000 Godin Natural Summit CT, a versatile carved-top solidbody. The authors of the second- and third-most popular posts each win a set of Seymour Duncan pickups of their choice (excluding Custom Shop models).
Drop by the Secret Room and read the winning posts — or anything else that captures your interest. All you have to do is upload one of your best tone secrets. Read more here.
How did you make sure that a user could not rate their own secret over and over? Did you have some sort of logger with everybody having an individual password that identified them? Just curious from a technical standpoint as I have always wondered how these internet contest worked internally. Thanks again for all your hard work there is so much great info, I have learned a lot.
Good question!
The voting plug-in only lets you record one rating. You can change your rating, thus affecting the overall score, but each vote from the same user overwrites any previous ones.
Clearly, some contestants “called in the cavalry” and got their friends to vote. But there was no rule against that. And all the relatively sudden jumps in rating were matched by jumps in legitimate entry submissions.
The easy cheat would be to simply share the password with a lot of people. But I didn’t see evidence of that, and I know everyone here would be too cool to try that.
Just wish there was a better way to judicate those last prizes. I had a hard time finding the tips and stuff I wrote in. It was a letdown, but I respect that it was your decision how to run the contest. A suggestion- you might want to catalog secrets according to topic so it’s easier to maneuver around. Thanks for the contest!
Hi Mark — actually, the secrets ARE categorized according to topic — please not the menu bar across the top of each page. Additionally, there are thousands and thousands of tags for the posts — really, try the search function and see . 🙂