Let the Suspense Continue...
The What's Inside You Contest has officially ended. So, what's next?Early next week, the judging will begin. To help kick this off, we will be going through the Top 10 Community Vote Getters and ensuring that only valid entries are included in the list provided to the Judges. This means that a few entries will be removed due to the Rule, "US residents only". While Intel is a global company, unfortunately, this particular contest is for US residents only for legal purposes. To help everyone understand who is on the Top 10 and who is not in the Top 10, I will publish the official list and update the Share Your Story page with the accurate list. Watch for this next week!
If you are among the Top 10 Community Vote Getters, the next date for you to be aware of is February 11 when the winners selected by the Judges will be notified. This notification will be followed by additional qualification procedures outlined in the Contest Rules and Regulations.
On March 2, you can expect the winners to be announced. On this date, we will update intel.com with the winning stories highlighted broadly.
I've received several inquiries over the last few weeks on a few topics, so let me address those:
- Yes, the Contest was a success. I am thrilled with the quality of submissions. Obviously, there are some very talented people using Intel technology to do amazing things. This is something that Intel strongly suspected and we're happy to see this suspicion validated. This was our first contest hosted directly on intel.com. We knew there would be challenges, but all-in-all we are very happy with the results. I hope that even though the Contest has officially ended, that you browse the entries and other stories within the What's Inside You Collection. The range of possibility is what makes working at Intel an absolute delight for me.
- Submission Errors occurred. We received several reports of errors during submission. As a team, we thoroughly tested the system using multiple browsers. We will continue to test the system. Our QA team is nicknamed "Eagle Eyes". If you received an error, please let us know. I'd love to determine the issues, so we can fix them.
- Voting could be hacked. We knew this going into the Contest. Short of requiring login for voting, there was no way to foolproof the system. To help mitigate the risks, we made the decision to include a Judging component to the Contest. I think this helps, but no it is not perfect. There are a few stories that did not make it to the Top 10 where true innovation and processing power is explored. I'm not a Judge, and we have these stories, so please be rest assured that these stories will be highlighted in several venues moving forward.
- There are not currently plans for another Contest. However, we will be exploring new engagement opportunities, so stay tuned. The Inside Scoop is our communication vehicle, so please subscribe or bookmark us to keep in touch.
Best Luck to you all!
(* t-shirts will be shipped in the next 1-2 weeks for all qualified entries)
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Comments
Jan 23 | bonh said:
Good luck to everyone! Thanks Annie for everything! I know you guys did the best you could! Thanks for all the hard work to bring us this contest.
Jan 23 | Lightbulb said:
10 Tips for a better contest next time.
1. Research the problems and issues other online contests have had. Your not the first one to have fraud issues. Every online contest with winners based on public voting I've entered has had issues with fraudulent votes. All of them handled it better than you.
2. If you are going to use sessions on a long form, let the user know that they can't stand still.
3. Separate Account creation from the Story submission. Let the user get their account information done before they bother with a submission. First time submitters were bombarded with the need to input a bunch of data all on one page. The option to upload an avatar likely caused some people to spent 15 minutes finding and creating an image the right size before they even started to fill out the story part, increasing the odds of a session timeout.
4. Separate large uploads from other inputs. Large uploads are prone to failure, so design your software in such a way the user doesn't loose their story when it happens. Look at how http uploads work on youtube.
5. Understand how sessions affect everything. A 50mb movie takes 30+ minutes to upload from the east coast. The session timer is still running during the upload phase leaving a user with a great movie in the cold when they just spent 30 minutes typing the written part.
6. On the Story entry form, give users the option to save and comeback. (This would also encourage longer more thought out stories). Add ajax so that the form autosaves every few minutes as people type (and would refreshes the session). Look at how Blogger's Post submission form works.
7. Test the application in the real world. I call it the Aunt Sue test. If my non computer savvy great Aunt can understand what to do, the site is finally usable enough. Watch a third party use your site with real data not bs "THIS is a TEST qwerty sfsdssa" crap and you'll find the real problems. The only thing that's particularly good right now is the timeline/steps indication bar that can show users that your site fudged and skipped steps.
8. Don't rely on cookies to prevent vote fraud. Your reliance on Javascript based cookies made the problem even lamer.
9. There are ways of reducing vote fraud without forcing voters to register an account. Add counter measures to stop floods. Consider adding capacha to stop bots and macros. Making guests type "Scoop" doesn't count. A determined user would just added that to their script. On top of that, add something that prevents actual human mass voting by limiting on the backend how many votes per hour/day/week a particular IP address can have. You can dampen it's harshness by also looking at useragents and javascript attributes like screen size. Make it more effective against fraud by adding a sleep command to the script based on how many votes an IP has submitted; Real voters will wait but repeat ones will quickly get discouraged but you have to randomize it a bit so they can't easily detect that they are being played. Add a referrer check with a unique code to everything so that a user can't take the voting form out of context.
10. Keep your users happy. You gave yourself an out in the contest rules: "Sponsor reserves the right to cancel or modify contest and award the prize through an alternate means if fraud or technical failure compromises the integrity of the contest" One online contest I did was overtaken with severe vote fraud so the sponsor changed the contest to award small prizes based on user voting and the grand prizes were picked by 2 tiers of judges. The end result was fantastic. There were no disagreements about who was in the top 10 and who should have won.
Jan 26 | Annie said:
Thanks for the tips, Lightbulb!
Jan 26 | Becky Emmett said:
Excited to see how it turns out!
Feb 03 | Dilu said:
Hi... Annie..
One question?
WIY contest for a resident of the United States, not for American Citizens. am i right?
The prizes will send to American address only. At the time of entering into the contest, all the 48 entries had given their American address for sending the T-Shirts.
Any foreigner( Outside the US) cant reside in America???