I recently went to vote for some on-line challenges and was struck by how many of the entries have such low scores. Then, as I decided to vote, I nearly made the mistake of hitting the submit button without realizing that I was supposed to first move a slider along the 1 to 5 scale. My first impression was that I had to click on the submit-a-vote button to be taken to a page or something that allowed me to vote.
Since the submit button defaults to the rating of 1, I’m now wondering if people are inadvertently casting low scoring votes because they get caught off guard by the way the button system is set up.
Just wondering if the low scores are real (and the voters are brutal) or just an artifact of the button default case.
The most common reason is that people upvote only their own submission, and give everyone else the lowest rank. In previous years people have made bots to do this and it skews the voting a lot.
This can be fully explained by people using social media outlets to get x number of people to upvote one entry, and to downvote others, specifically others that are doing better.
It’s been happening since the beginning, and I would know because I was there.
I would gut the voting system entirely, or I would restrict it to one vote per VRC TEAM period. That’s one vote per entry per year.
As I already wrote in these post there are several problems with the voting system or the challenges in general. It is actually possible to write a small piece of code that votes for a specific challenge for a specific score and include it to a website (for example your team website).
Whenever someone visits your site it will vote whatever you programmed it to vote. I am glad to say that vex knows about the problem and hopefully they are working on it. I am not planning on releasing these bugs, as it can and would be exploited by some teams. Even a proof-of-concept won’t be released for the public, to prevent exploiting it.
Doing a bot for the voting is not hard: The only thing that slows you down is the captcha, but with enough programing experience you also know how to circumvent this. A good idea would be to limit the voting to one vote every 30 seconds to slow down bots, or let the user type in a captcha for every for example 5th vote which could be annoying for some users (but combined with the 30 seconds limit it is nearly perfect). Another idea would be to require a number of forum posts to vote, but I am not sure if VEX wants this because they might want to keep the voting open for everybody.
tbh there’s bound to be more than 1 attack vector for this site but the effort required far exceeds any possible benefit obtained so it’s near irrelevant even bringing it up. Down voters will still come regardless as is truely evident on the 7682 educational video this season http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/4168 @16 votes 82.5%
Followed by 2/5, 2/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5
