2012/10/5 Peter Ekman pdekman@gmail.com:
Probably more important is the case where somebody starts uploading hundreds of photos just before the deadline (Did this actually happen somewhere?) To me that suggests something wrong, but not with the bot or even the rules of the contest. I'm not sure I would know how to fix that behavior.
We had such a user. He claimed that he had prepared 40 pictures using upload wizzard and then upoladed just a couple of them before midnight CEST and the rest was upoladed a bit too late. He claimed that he did that from UK (although for Polish contest) and had UTC time set in his preferences, so was sure that his upload will be accepted. However our regulation clearly stated that the end of contest is at midnight CEST. Dura lex, sed lex - but I would like to avoid such situations. This guy was really angry - his pictures were really good - so in fact - Wikimedia Commons lost a good photographer. He stayed anonymous - if we know his personal data at least we could send him some gadgets or small gift to please him :-) As the one of the main goals of the contest is to encourage people to stay with us after the contest - such a situations are counter effective. I see two solutions for next year:
To enable a kind of warning banner saying for example "please hurry up there is 15 min. left and 3 MB file takes several minutes to upload on slower connections..." + have some special "excuse" prize for unlucky uploaders who are late for several minutes...