Hi all,
a few remarks from this discussion:
* The suggestions by Polimerek sound really good - although I'm not sure if it is viable to set up such an extra banner system (it's quite a lot of work).
* There will '''always''' be people just too late... So lets not get discouraged by that.
* Pete: yes, the local jury should decide on the interpretation and admission. However, a) this doesn't mean we agree with it/like it, and b) reverting a bot is not the way to implement it. If you have valid exceptions (might very well be good reasons for), you should contact Platonides directly. But please be careful with this.
* Finally: to get the contest recognized by externals (such as Guinness Book of World Records) changing the rules half way might actually be detrimental. While we may consider this 'not important', for outsiders changing the rules is a sign of not being serious and in fact bending the rules is almost asking for conflicts of interest.
Best,
Lodewijk
2012/10/5 Tomasz Ganicz
<polimerek@gmail.com>
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...
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz