I was giving it some thought about how I would run a contest similar to this one as not to promote spam but at the same time intend for high user participation.

I think a way that works, at least with regard to forum posting is such:
Just choose a random number, it could be 1, 10, 100, 1000 or whatever.  Dont disclose this number, keep it secret.  Tell users to participate on the forums as they see fit.  When the contest is over, take each users number of posts and take the absolute value of the difference between your “secret number” and the user’s number of posts.
Give every user a starting point total and subtract that absolute value number from the point total.  The user with the most points is of course the winner.  Users can increase their point total prior to forum points adjustment by means similar to the ones you have included (add-me on facebook, add-me on twitter, subscribe on youtube, etc.) but the forum would have the most significant effect and the scoring would certainly thwart spam and influence participation.

For example:
Pick your number, lets say 67.
A user who posts 10 times, very poor participation, has a score of 57 (67-10).
A user who posts 200 times, borderline spam, has a score of 133 (abs(67-200))
A user who posts 55 times, standard participation, has a score of 12 (67-55).
A user who posts 67 times, standard participation, has a score of 0 (67-67).

So if you give everyone a start score of 50…the guy who posts exactly the 67 posts would win… (50 to 38 to -7, to -150).  It adds a certain random selection element to the process, yes, but that is where the participation in other bonus ways comes in.  So the guy with 55 posts who adds you by facebook and twitter for 10pts a piece would be at 70…and then would win with a score of 52.

It would make things rather…interesting…keep everyone guessing as to who is the winner.  It would be also very scientific :-D.

What do you think?

Certainly too late to change the HDX competition .

Wow, very interesting and neat suggestion Tokar. I do think that for this contest, it was kind of interesting how they just said “highest points.” After they said that, the forums exploded with a huge amount of threads and posts. It was truly crazy, threads were being created and I have to saw, I created a lot of threads during that first day of the contest. I think to add with your suggestion, I wouldn’t mind a “Top 10” or even “Top 20” with the highest posters. In the end, they should eliminate the ones who spammed and then look at the ones that contributed and interacted with the members of the forum. Another suggestion for future contests is probably more moderators around the Gear Live Forums, interacting with new members, chatting, answering our questions about the contest, etc. I hope they do a contest in the future and take some suggestions from our feedback and opinions.

some people think that if you have a high post count that you are spamming this isnt true for everyone, i have been on here most of the time every day.

littlebull - 04 June 2008 05:19 PM

some people think that if you have a high post count that you are spamming this isnt true for everyone, i have been on here most of the time every day, i dont work and have a computer to access 24/7. so i think that some of us who do have a high post count should not all be considered spamming maybe some but not all.

maybe in the future we can write a story and submit it, maybe a story about i dont know type a line out and have us type you a story, and have everyone be creative and such.

Well, I think people can be creative in many, many ways and this was the contest idea for Gear Live. It was a great and pretty unique contest idea, I’m pretty sure they thought a lot about the spam and everything. I think these suggestions will be quite helpful for the next contest in the future if they do decide to do a “points” thing again. However, as mentioned many times, they will end up disqualifying people who are spamming and it is a huge prize package, so they will definitely look over many factors such as contribution and interaction with members before making the final decision.

i doubt andru will ever use gear points for contests anymore, my guess is that the man power it takes to moderate the forum and remove all spam posts. i think Tokar’s suggestion is actually really smart.

The gear points will be here to stay and Gear Live will have more contests in the future as Andru mentioned in one of the threads today. The Gear Live point system is very interesting and well, I’m glad they decided to launch it during one of the best giveaways ever.

I think in future contests the number of new threads that can be created by a single person should be capped per day.  This would force you to use the threads sparingly and to really put a lot of thought into what question or topic you want to create.  It would also prevent us from flying through a lot of the interesting questions early on like we did.  A lot of the questions that were asked were more to find out about the rest of the people we were competing against, and the questions that were deeper and hit on hot-button issues did not get as much attention as they should have deserved.  Less threads means more conversation and less fragmented ideas for threads that are often repeats of other threads.

I don’t like it… in the end it’d still depend on luck of whether you posted close enough to the contest host’s number. Whlie I do agree with limits spam, it also disqualifies people who might have contributed a fair bit and lost by a very close number.

The topics should be moderated before made public, or you can blacklist certain keyword strings like “Your favorite” or “What if” in the topic title. Just an idea, but I still don’t like the random number thing.

I’m not coming back here again.

Another suggestion I would love to make for future contests is that during this stunning contest, a lot of our points (mainly posts, threads) kept going up and down and up and down. I do know that there were lots of spam threads, but I think it would have been better for Gear Live to leave them be and see what people wrote in them. A few of us did contribute to those “spam” threads and well, it truly was like battling a storm with our points during these last few days of the giveaway, haha.

Lol yes we can just read what we wrote before and laugh at it if it’s spam
I think we should leave all our posts and topics until almost the end of the contest, then as the contest host reads through everything, he/she deletes all the topics and posts considered as spam so then we can keep track of what’s happening. 2 more of my topics died, and now I’m a few points shorter lol.