You left a link to your contest on my contest page, so I'm checking it out. I like what you are doing, but your winner is selected by majority vote. This would be fine if everyone votes normally, but with so many bots following curation trails, the winner could be someone who just happened to hit a curation trail, or even worse, someone who owns a bot army and simply sets it to vote on their own post. I was fortunate enough to have a couple of honest participants enter my contest and explain to me why they were able to skew the odds in their favor. This led me to alter the way the contest worked in order to make it fair to everyone. Now I am letting you know that your contest is also open to manipulation.
The idea for the contest is fantastic, so I don't wish to discourage you there. Perhaps you can round up a team of volunteers to select a winner based on some predetermined criteria that might change from contest to contest? If you get too many good entries and cannot decide, you may decide to use one of the online random pickers from all entries or from a smaller list that has been delegated as potential winners.
I'm sure you will figure something out. Welcome to Steemit and good luck!
Thank you for helping not only him, but also me @happyme... it is not something that I would've thought of but I've seen the bots hit things. This kind of information is very useful and I'm glad you took time out to tell us.
I'm always willing to share anything I learn.
I really appreciate the time you took to help sort me out. I am greatful you left useful feedback in a positive way on both my original post and then took the time to follow through the link and stop here with more feedback!
I like Dave had no idea about bot armies...
I have thought about your advice and have been watching the contestants and how they missed the upvote someone else part. I am thinking it will be more about comments next week... make the contestants read the other posts, comment and vote. I am hoping it will help teach people about commenting and make sure they get exposure on their own piece, because the contestants will have to read it to comment.
While speaking about commenting and how we met... I am not the only one that is unsure of when is appropriate to link-drop. I found this article this morning written by someone relatively new and thought of you to link or not
Like you, I'm having a heck of a time trying to get people to actually READ the entire post and engage with it by commenting. I like to reward all my commenters with an up-vote to show my appreciation and thus encourage more comments.
I made a reply to the link you provided. It is only my own opinion as there are no hard and fast rules, but I prefer to be on the cautious side. One flag from a whale can knock your reputation back to nothing!