How can we improve the patch contests?

[Shabdahbriah]

... it seems to me far from ideal that we have this open voting system in which the votes of those placed earlier may, in a number of different ways, influence the votes that follow.

Which is more 'likely', than not.

[2c]

[hakey]

To be honest I'm getting burned out

me too...

[Bronto Scorpio]

I'd love to help out to give the community something back but I'm never sure when I have access to teh interwebz, so this would probably a bad idea

Cheers
Dennis

[hakey]

No worries Bronto.

[xh3rv]

I've just been googling tools to let people create online polls. There's more to investigate, but I believe SurveyMonkey with a free account could handle a lot of things elegantly. I just created a dummy survey that I think shows off the capabilities ... http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/25W3F7R

+ Quick to set up polls, more secret voting, same voting format, orders of magnitude more flexibility than polling possible in phpBB

- Not sure with SurveyMonkey how easy reporting results would be; I think the free account might be crippled to require some inelegant cutting and pasting. Perhaps another site has better features here.

Looks like there's a range of similar sites and there might be some pros/cons to each feature-wise, but would this make sense for contest administration?

[Bronto Scorpio]

The bad thing about these sites is that it's to easy to cheat. I simply could tell my girlfriend her brother and his dog to vote for me. Or would't that be possible?
Otherwise a nice idea!

Edit: Ahh OK! Nice! I have to insert my KVR name at the end. That's a really great solution!

Cheers
Dennis

[hakey]

Thanks for doing that xh3rv!

That looks very promising indeed.

would this make sense for contest administration?

[bmrzycki]

Sure as heck works for me.

[hakey]

Regarding using an on-line survey provider, some points to consider:

• We only need to be able to choose and rate our 5 favourite patches.
• Whilst voting is ongoing the results need to be locked to everybody.
• Once voting is over the results need to be open to everybody.
• The results should show who has voted and what their votes were.

I've had a quick go at setting up a survey using the same provider as xh3rv and it's all rather confusing, at least to me.

If anyone can be bothered to find out more about other service providers and what's involved, it would be appreciated.

[xh3rv]

Regarding using an on-line survey provider, some points to consider:

• We only need to be able to choose and rate our 5 favourite patches.
• Whilst voting is ongoing the results need to be locked to everybody.
• Once voting is over the results need to be open to everybody.
• The results should show who has voted and what their votes were.

I've had a quick go at setting up a survey using the same provider as xh3rv and it's all rather confusing, at least to me.

If anyone can be bothered to find out more about other service providers and what's involved, it would be appreciated.

I'm halfway between the couch and the bed and a little groggy, apologies -

On your first point, I believe the poll I posted should function the way voting has been done with the contests - the question format is 'forced ranking' or something like that, all columns (rankings) must be used exactly once for the user to complete the question. There's a list of a dozen or so possible types of questions you can get at with the 'edit question' dialog, SurveyMonkey is really strong on this.

On the second and third points, the administrator of a survey can access results. Publishing those results is the one caveat with SurveyMonkey, it has tools there but they're for paying customers. BUT - is cut and paste into a post on KVR good enough? I think it might be, a little bit of hassle but I doubt it would take more than 10 or 15 minutes to get that done for a full contest ... It would look like this per voter:

Code: Select all

1. How are the patches?
 	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)
patch A	 	X	 	 	 
patch B	 	 	 	 	X
patch C	 	 	X	 	 
patch D	 	 	 	X	 
patch E	X	 	 	 	 
patch F	 	 	 	 	 
patch G	 	 	
2. Comments?
No Response
3. KVR handle?
xh3rv

Code: Select all

 	 (1)	 (2)	 (3)	 (4)	 (5)
patch A	X	 	 	 	 
patch B	 	 	X	 	 
patch C	 	 	 	 	 
patch D	 	 	 	X	 
patch E	 	X	 	 	 
patch F	 	 	 	 	 
patch G	 	 	 	 	X
2. Comments?
patch A - Awesome!!!! Whooooooo!
patch B - The hotness!!!
patch C - A piece of crap!
patch D - Seriously? Is that even a patch?
patch E - Sounds like a dancing Evok on steroids! It's crap!
patch F - No! Just _NO_!!!
patch G - This insults my ears!
3. KVR handle?
Bronto Scorpio

And this for vote summary (all of this is just cut and paste, the vote summary might be easier to read with a little bit of editing as well [e] - total score for a patch is the last two numbers multiplied, those are average rating and times rated):

Code: Select all

patch A	33.3% (1)	33.3% (1)	0.0% (0)	33.3% (1)	0.0% (0)	2.33	3
patch B	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	66.7% (2)	0.0% (0)	33.3% (1)	3.67	3
patch C	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	50.0% (1)	0.0% (0)	50.0% (1)	4.00	2
patch D	33.3% (1)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	66.7% (2)	0.0% (0)	3.00	3
patch E	33.3% (1)	66.7% (2)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	1.67	3
patch F	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.00	0
patch G	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	0.0% (0)	100.0% (1)	5.00	1

SurveyMonkey's site and tools are fast and snappy enough that I think it's pretty quick to do this. Also I should note that setting up the poll in the first place is a lot friendlier and streamlined than on KVR ... just enter a list with one voting option per line, no hassles with weird phpBB behavior. One can even create a template survey with everything but the list of poll items configured.

I wouldn't say I've done a completely exhaustive investigation of the poll sites but at least a pretty exhaustive one ... SurveyMonkey felt the best, and I even think it might be the only one that's flexible enough to set up comments & asking for KVR user name. Some other sites had better free reporting tools, but nowhere near as much flexibility with actual poll questions.

[hakey]

With the test survey that you posted would it have been possible to label the options across the top '1st', '2nd', '3rd'.. etc?

Copy pasting the individual votes + comments + kvr handle into a post here might result in a huge amount of text that wouldn't be that easy to read. Would there be some other way to give people access to the info at the end of the poll - perhaps on the survey site itself?

And it seems there would still be a fair bit of work required from a neutral (ie non participating) third party.