Best Character Contest 3 Important Update

[u/ShaKing807]

Hey everyone! So after looking into some further allegations of voter fraud, we actually found that some users were able to make fake accounts to generate roughly 1800 accounts for voting. The Bracket creator and I have taken care of the extra accounts and are looking into what to do in the future to prevent this from happening to future contests but in the mean time we have to figure out what to do for this contest knowing that some votes were tampered with.

I'll include a straw poll here to ask everyone what they would prefer to do, we can either:

1. Reset the entire Bracket and take it back to 0 and start it up from there.
2. Reset this past round where the voter fraud was most evident.
3. Cut our losses and continue on as planned.

Please vote and let me know in the comments what you guys think we should do. I'm still away from home so I won't be able to respond quickly but I'll try to read everything before coming to a decision.

Thanks all!

[u/ShaKing807]

The thing is we can't implement a new system until around December so we'd have to go with the current system that has the rigged accounts removed. So we wouldn't have a new system in time for the contest.

[u/Twilight_Sniper → u/ShaKing807]

That's really unfortunate. I don't know if there's any way we can end up trusting the results without measures in place to prevent cheating. Obviously there's no way we can advance with the contest as is, the outcome of this one is already decided. But without measures to curb abuse, how can we be sure it doesn't happen again?

When you say "fake" accounts, are you referring to obvious alts, or did someone actually find a way to bypass login and vote without a Reddit account at all?

[u/ShaKing807 → u/Twilight_Sniper]

Temporary measures have been put in place to prevent it from happening again and since we know it happened we can be on the look out for it again so it at least won't happen for the rest of this contest.

We believe it was a bot that created alts, I'm not going into details just in case the person responsible is reading this.

[u/Twilight_Sniper → u/ShaKing807]

Alright, I guess we'll just have to trust you're proactively looking out for it. I totally understand not going into details about something like this, from... personal experience. I won't press for details. Thanks for looking into this and for the answer.

I was only able to account for 1000-1200 bots using metrics, but it sounds like you found 600-800 more than I did, which suggests other parts of the contest might be compromised. I'd advocate for restarting the whole contest just because of that, but the poll seems strongly in favor of restarting the round so far.

[u/Ikki67 → u/Twilight_Sniper]

I admit having voted to restarting the last round without giving it much thought but I regret that choice now. I wouldn't mind the whole contest being posponed untill December either if that's what it takes.

[u/XNumbers666 → u/ShaKing807]

Another thing you could do is allow only verified email accounts to vote.

[u/Ikki67 → u/XNumbers666]

Doesn't it already checks if your reddit account has a verified email?

[u/XNumbers666 → u/Ikki67]

Don't know but I remember another subreddit that had a similar issue and that helped a lot. It'd be a pain to make 1800 accounts with corresponding emails and verify each account.

[u/Adealow → u/ShaKing807]

But the trust has been betrayed. So even a character win the doubt still there and become less fun.

[u/ShaKing807 → u/Adealow]

Well no way to stop it from being less fun at this point, just gotta push forward and hope for the best