I was rather hoping to discuss this after the voting portion was over. I wanted to focus on the positive aspect of the awards before I, and the rest of the forum, addressed this issue.
I also figured that anyone who gave it more than a moment's thought could have already figured out who was the culprit without any additional information. There were a total of four people involved in the inner workings of the awards this year - myself, Zerospace, Gabe and Iceman (awards/graphics only), and only three of those people were provided with access to passwords and the coding. I don't understand coding. The only thing I know about CSS is that they are three quite tasty letters in my alphabet soup.
The primary reason why I did not publicize the other person's name is because they were the whistleblower. Had they not gone through the logs and brought it to Zerospace and my attention, it might never have been discovered. The awards process would have run through its entirety and it's possible that, using the same system, this could happen again and without the organizers' knowledge. Additionally, I also wanted the rest of the awards to run as smoothly as possible. What would prevent the culprit from deleting entries and/or the entire platform?
However, if the forum decides that they not only want the names of both people involved, but want to bar them from future participation in any awards, I will abide by that decision and make both names public. While the handling of cheating is up to the sole discretion of the organizer per the established rules, I believe that any decision affecting future awards should be up to the community instead. As I said earlier, I wanted to wait until after the awards to address this. I propose on running two individual topics afterwards, both with polls ( so that you can remain annoymous). They are -
1) Should the culprits be allowed to participate (submit artwork & vote) in future awards, and if a temporary ban is selected, how long that ban should be in place?
2) Should the culprits be allowed to help in the organization (Coding and organization) in the future?
Of course, if you feel that any additional topics addressed to this should be made or would like changes made in the wording of these topics, please let me know.
Zetsuai wrote:that's exactly what I thought when I read the posting from cutiebunny ... (O.o) ...
I wrote her a pm 2 days ago, but no answer yet ... I wanted to wait for an answer before posting something here, but since there are so many writing about it ...
Really...you're going to play the victim card here? Really?!
BTW..you wrote the PM on September 7. It's still the 9th here. At least give me two FULL days to get back to you on it.
But, since you elected to go this route, here's an excerpt from your PM.
yes I looked during the last week about 2 times a day at the categories
I was simply curious what's there this year ... my occupation is being a software tester, so searching for peeks is my job ... so yeah you can blame me for that but what your wrote about "every 20 minutes" is ridiculous since I don't have so much time at work ...
Regardless of whether you 'peeked' once or every twenty minutes, you still
peeked. And that constitutes as cheating. Now, if you had contacted the organizers prior to the start of the submission period and asked if you could test the system, check for possible security risks, etc., we might have allowed that. But I never received any email or PM asking if you could do this.
and if there is someone else who took a peek, why is only my name written there???
To my knowledge, it was just you who 'peeked' as I'm sure both individuals checked quite thoroughly before the start of the voting period. If others were involved (and you have names and proof), please let me know so I can delete their entries/votes and publish their names. As I said in my return PM to you, any knowledge you have on additional cheating could be quite helpful in forum's decision as to whether or not you should participate, in any form, in future awards.