Contest Exploitation?

Hello Buckley, it is possible that users are spamming challenges with irrelevant photos in order to gain awards and credits, but it is up to the moderators to disqualify images that are not according to challenge rules.

Can you please suggest what kind of moderating/management tool did you have in mind?

Thank you for your response.

I am new to the site so maybe some of these things exist and I haven't found them yet...

While I acknowledge that letting people run contests and giving them supreme power over entries would also be potentially subjected to abuse itself, I feel the following changes would not give any more power then what is currently given (the ability to disqualify images)

1. A management tool for contests that filters and shows only submissions by User, Disqualified Images, Time (possibly hour?) posted. With details why the image was disqualified.

2. The ability to disqualify by User and/or a way to flag users who are abusing/exploiting contests so pixoto moderators can review their submissions. The reason for this is one particular user spammed a contest and and about a large amount of their photos did not even nearly fit the theme.

3. A way to warn individual users that their submissions are not fitting of the theme and they may be disqualified if they continue to submit more irrelevant entries (A step down before disqualifying a user completely)

4. An appeal and review system for disqualified users to explain why they think their photo should be submitted.

5. A blacklist system, so if a user has been disqualified completely from a lot of other competitions (to the point that it would be obvious they are not just misunderstanding the contest requirements), then the contest runner can be alerted to that particular users submissions.

this is the scary suggestion

6. As an added deterrent, possibly replacing a users awards area with an actual dunce cap for limited amounts of time if they continually do things that the community would generally frown upon (Vote and favorite boosting, contest exploitation, deliberate mis-categorization etc)

PS: A tab that lets you easily view contest you have created would be nice. :)

Hello Buckley, thank you so much for all suggestions, I will forward them to management.

Some of them are already in place.

We do (for now) disqualifications on photo level, and not on user's level, so if user submit lots of irrelevant photos we will not ban him/her from submitting to challenges.

User's can write in comment section on challenge to explain why they think their photo should be submitted.

Every user whose image is disqualified gets e-mail notification with reason why the image is disqualified.