Hey everyone,
Over the past few days, there have been serious concerns raised by various members of the Community regarding the rules, management of, and general fairness of the B/RCS College Football Contest. These concerns finally reached their peak today, when site celebrity Lisa Horne published an article on the subject which soon found itself on the front page.
Before we get into the sticky details, I wanted to thank both Lisa and Gray Ghost for speaking up when something didn’t sit right with them. These are two of our College Football Community’s most passionate contributors, and they care deeply about the integrity of the Bleacher Report network in general.
Secondly, I would also like to thank Justin Goar, who even after being accused of cheating kept his cool. Justin was the victim of our failure as a Community staff to communicate the rules of the contest clearly to the user base. I cannot express to him how sorry I am that he, rather than I, became the target for some people’s anger.
To clarify, Justin is without question one of the classiest gents on the site, and is in fact about to be a father. He clearly could have done without this headache, but throughout it all he has not once tried to pin blame on others nor lost his temper.
Okay, now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the verdict.
After careful deliberation, thought, and discussion with my partners, we are standing by the rules of the B/RCS as they were originally stated. A copy of those rules can be found here.
When you create a contest with monetary prizes involved, you have to live with the rules you set ahead of time. Doing anything other than that is completely unfair to the participants, not to mention illegal.
As you will notice, there is nothing in the rules that prohibits writers from using the contest as a way to recruit their friends and family to Bleacher Report. This issue was discussed during the planning of the contest, and it was decided that this could be a great way of attracting new readership to the site.
Would I change the rules to make the voting more exclusive, if I could go back in time? Perhaps. Lisa, Gray Ghost, Kristofer Green, Georgia Dawg, and many others make very compelling arguments for why this recruiting voters brings an element of popularity into the contest that could interfere with the most talented writer being sent to Miami.
Then again, locking the contest out to new members seems to go against the inclusive nature of Bleacher Report as an “Open Source Sports Network.” And isn’t that inclusiveness one of the things that makes B/R so special?
Either way, the simple fact of the matter is that I cannot travel back in time, and thus I have to live by the decision that was originally made before the contest began.
I apologize profusely if the rules were in any way miscommunicated by Trey and I in the follow-up Q&A. I will take full responsibility for this and I am truly sorry guys—it is abundantly clear that I messed up big time.
What I was trying to get at in my initial response to the question about cheating was that we put security measures in place to ensure that votes cast in the contest were credible:
- A user has to have been a member of B/R for a certain amount of time for their vote to count, ensuring that people can’t sign up, vote, and never return.
- A user has to have spent a certain amount of time on an article page for their vote to count, ensuring that they actually read the piece they’re voting for.
- Votes coming from the same IP address shall not be counted more than once, ensuring that someone can’t create impostor accounts as a way of racking up MyPicks totals.
- Our engineering team has the full ability to audit all of the B/RCS voting data and look for abnormalities should anything seem fishy or cheating is suspected…which is exactly what was done in this case.
After doing a thorough audit of the data, we have detected no foul play thus far. As such, no action will be taken to penalize any of the contests’ current participants.
Thanks again for all of the Creature feedback during this process. I am truly sorry for any confusion I and the rest of our staff may have caused, and I truly hope that we can put this behind us and move forward together as a Community.