People's Choice Awards Part One

[eris]

Vote for your favorite!
The winner of the People's Choice Poll receives free entry to DEFCON 2013!
Voting Closes June 10th, 2013, Midnight.

Be warned. If you try to bot votes, you go against the DEFCON forum crew, not the contest organizer group. Go ahead, piss off DEFCON to get free entry, see how that works out for ya.

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards!

Vote for your favorite!
The winner of the People's Choice Poll receives free entry to DEFCON 2013!
Voting Closes June 10th, 2013, Midnight.

Be warned. If you try to bot votes, you go against the DEFCON forum crew, not the contest organizer group. Go ahead, piss off DEFCON to get free entry, see how that works out for ya.

OK....that is an UGLY poll. I wonder why the links didn't embed to the titles...well, I will try to clean it up some today,folks. Sorry about that.

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

511 thread views, 18 total votes. I hope the rest of you are still reading and taking a thoughtful moment to really decide your favorite one......!

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

It has been mentioned that perhaps the public listing of those who have voted in the results page may be preventing some of you from freely voting. I do not have an admin option to change the privacy setting of a poll already posted and voted on, but I have requested possible assistance from forum administrators.

If your name showing up in a poll regarding a short story popularity contest is a problem for you, I apologize if it cannot be changed. It never occurred to me it was an issue regarding the subject at hand as on the forums we are all under pseudonyms anyway but I have been wrong before.

[TheCotMan]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

It has been mentioned that perhaps the public listing of those who have voted in the results page may be preventing some of you from freely voting. I do not have an admin option to change the privacy setting of a poll already posted and voted on, but I have requested possible assistance from forum administrators.

If your name showing up in a poll regarding a short story popularity contest is a problem for you, I apologize if it cannot be changed. It never occurred to me it was an issue regarding the subject at hand as on the forums we are all under pseudonyms anyway but I have been wrong before.

This poll has been edited; how people voted has been removed from public display.

Mods/Admins can still see how people voted. We may also be asked to detect abuse and allow the judges to revise vote counts if it looks like a person is voting more than once, using multiple accounts. (people using multiple accounts risk being banned, as that is a forum rule violation, even if it is "just used for voting.")

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

Understood, CotMan. I had made the poll open for the same reason, it was open last year, I didn't see the need to be private about votes for stories on an already anonymous forum, but I am also happy to try to ensure participants feel comfortable. It was a problem for the forum admins, a little bit, however so my attitude next year will change.



For everyone else, now that it is understood why we make the polls open, next year it will be open again, so please plan accordingly if it is a problem for you. Thanks!!!

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

As a non-tech person, my mother asked me to post her appreciation for the stories that were written in a way that one didn't need to be a geek to read them. I won't point out any she mentioned so as to avoid any undue slant in voting. She wanted to me tell all of the authors that as a non tech person, with a pre-conceived notion of the way we think (linear, without creativity, mathematically) she was pleasantly surprised at the entries I received. (She has a techy sort of geeky daughter and still I get this!)

Good job everyone! I am really looking forward to seeing the results of the People's Choice Polls!

[number006]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

Why was the poll close early? Was supposed to be open until Midnight June 10!

From Eris's post when he opened the poll:

"Vote for your favorite!
The winner of the People's Choice Poll receives free entry to DEFCON 2013!
Voting Closes June 10th, 2013, Midnight. "

[number006]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

I found out the post was closed by someone who was trying to vote for my story and asked me why it was closed.

[TheCotMan]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

I found out the post was closed by someone who was trying to vote for my story and asked me why it was closed.

Just when midnight happens is a point of disagreement and ambiguity. Let us assume DAY_1 is 23:59:59; add one more second, and ask, is this DAY_2 or DAY_1?
No. You are not allowed to ask me if the 00:00:00 which was 23 hours,59 minutes and 59 second earlier was part of DAY1 or not, in order to settle this; that would be asking me the question I am asking you and any other reader.

For programmers, counting usually starts at zero. So, for evaluation of a day would begin at 00:00:00 and adding one more second to 23:59:59 would make it another day.

If this is the case, then "midnight" or 00:00:00 June 10 would be early in the morning of the same day, or 23:59:59 hours before the above "DAY_1 is 23:59:59"

There is additional confusion as midnight changes, depending on your timezone. If we are going by the timezone that the server is using, then that would be Pacific Time.

I do not know the intention of Eris, to know which she meant. You'll have to wait for her reply to know.

[number006]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

When is "midnight" is not the issue, it was closed sometime during the day today, Monday, June 10, long after the previous midnight and before the upcoming midnight. I only noticed it after 2:00pm EST, and noticed that another story had gotten another vote earlier today sometime between 11:00 and 2pm. There was a contradictory mention on the cointest site that the poll closed at 12:15 pm today, that might have been a complete misprint or an artifact of the time zone issue that Eris has run into before.

[TheCotMan]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

When is "midnight" is not the issue, it was closed sometime during the day today, Monday, June 10, long after the previous midnight and before the upcoming midnight. I only noticed it after 2:00pm EST, and noticed that another story had gotten another vote earlier today sometime between 11:00 and 2pm. There was a contradictory mention on the cointest site that the poll closed at 12:15 pm today, that might have been a complete misprint or an artifact of the time zone issue that Eris has run into before.

So your complaint is that is closed several hours after midnight on June 10 instead of right at midnight?

It looked like you were complaining that it closed too early in your post form around 11:28am today, pacific time.

Is your complaint now that it closed too late?

[number006]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

The contest announcement for the poll said "Voting Closes June 10th, 2013, Midnight." which seemed clear to me that it meant Midnight Monday, June 10, or Midnight tonight (pacific time presumably), so it looks to me that the poll closed too early, earlier than it was supposed to under the contest guidelines.

[TheCotMan]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

The contest announcement for the poll said "Voting Closes June 10th, 2013, Midnight." which seemed clear to me that it meant Midnight Monday, June 10, or Midnight tonight (pacific time presumably), so it looks to me that the poll closed too early, earlier than it was supposed to under the contest guidelines.

This is where the important of the definition of midnight "00:00:00" is important.

Today is June 10. If June 10 begins at 00:00:00, then midnight was about 15 hours 50 minutes ago Pacific time as of now();

If June 10 ends at 23:59:59.99999999 just short of 24:00:00 which is 00:00:00, then the only midnight possible for June 10 passed early this morning, and polls closing AFTER June 10 at 00:00:00 (this morning) would be a late closure of the poll, not early.

This is where the importance of when midnight actually is, is important.

From a programming Point of View, I would classify midnight as 00:00:00 for a day, and 00:00:01 as the same day.

Trying to classify 00:00:00 as a previous day and 00:00:01 as the next day creates all sorts of problems with support and code.

Saying a day begins at 00:00:01 and ends at 00:00:00 would make range-math rather complicated. [00:00:01,00:00:00] is not continuous when plotted and is not functional, but [00:00:00,23:59:59] is and can be functional, or more precisely, [00:00:00,24:00:00) which would be represented as: 00:00:00 <= TIME_IN_DAY < 24:00:00 to show a continuous, functional representation of time in a day for any value TIME_IN_DAY instead of breaking it into two conditional checks.

I can tell you how the forums work with polls, however...

When you create a poll at 2:00pm, and tell the forums the poll should last for 7 days, then the timer counts 7 * 24 hours before poll closes, meaning the poll will close 7*24 hours from creation date, or just after 2:00pm on the "7th day."

Time to close polls can be edited. However, I see no indication that any human closed these polls only 3 historical edits in the past: 1) change to hide how people voted several days ago, 2) add another story to the second poll, also several days ago. This means that the timer was used to close them. When you visited the poll before they closed, each poll should have given you a day and time that they were to close.

Disclaimer: I have no entry in this short story contest, and have not voted for any story.


As for what to do about the time the polls closed, that will be a decision for eris; my point is providing comment that midnight is ambiguous, and from a programming point of view, midnight "today" (June 10) has already happened.

[eris]

Re: People's Choice Awards Part One

Thank you, again, Cotman, for taking up the slack when I am asleep in my part of the world. I can't respond right away to problems and my other judges are buried under their own organizational nightmares.

I assume the issue is "my midnight" when I was making the poll and global midnight across the International Date Line where the forum is situated. I have responded to Number006 via PM.



Next year, this should all be fixed. There is always shake down problems in the first year someone organizes a contest(no the contest isnt first year but I am!)






However, and this may sound cold but if the only ones were issues with me getting time and dates a bit wrong I think I did pretty good. Those who may or may not have gotten to vote due to missing a few hours, well,...you did have ten days to get people to vote. Please keep that in mind for next year. Polls aren't like auctions, sniping at the last second won't get you a better deal. Get your vote in early, just to make sure you don't forget or that something doesn't go wrong.

Winners announced in a different thread.

-Eris