I recently built a form for the Community Relations department that would allow school’s to vote for an opportunity to receive a grant from the charitable arm of the Capitals. We didn’t have a long list of rules and the people responsible for overseeing that area didn’t think a 500-page rule book was needed. The premise is pretty simple and straight forward, send a picture of your school or class into Community Relations, five schools from around the area get picked, we post the five pictures and captions on the site and the students, teachers and families vote for their favorite pic. The winner receives a grant.
Living in a geographic region with a huge online, tech presence I probably should have known better and suggested using CAPTCHA or some other script-limiting device to keep the click-fraud in check.
Yeah, I didn’t.
And yes some of the schools appeared to have taken advantage of the loop hole and racked up more than 10,000 votes in just a few hours.
What kills me is the contest is hosted by the charitable arm of a professional sports team. The whole thing smacks of playing fair, not cheating and teaching your kids a lesson in hard work and dedication to a cause.
I guess now-a-days it is ok to cheat as long as you get the prize. We yanked the contest and are starting over. I would love to get your feedback on this, is it fair to use a script to crank up the vote count or is it click-fraud plain and simple?
