One of my employees who knows how strongly we feel about this suggested
we put out an internal bounty for anyone inside the company who is involved in
EPIC voting...I think we'll hold off on that for now. ;-)
>>> Before you do that, I don’t
think there is any actual proof that this was an Instantiations employee or IP
address? J
I think there are a couple of things that
we need to resolve: 1) what is our policy for handling these individual
requests,
I would suggest that the complaints be logged by Nathan and then
forwarded to the accused company...unless the questionable voting appears to be
"automated" in which case I would immediately call it to the
attention of the EPIC Council for possible action. If the accused company can't
refute the accusation and it happens again, then maybe we should talk about
blocking IP addresses from the rating process.
>>>> The problem is sometime
we don’t know who to contact. We just have an IP address. In
this case there might be a connection to Instantiations but I am not sure if we
to be in the business of ‘accusing’ people about voting on EPIC? Especially
when real proof is hard to get.
2) do we believe this is a legitimate
voting and who makes the decision and
Speaking legalistically, there are no rules against this type of voting
(at least that I know of) so there is no real punishable "offense",
and it follows that there's no decision to make.
>>> I actually tend to think that
the votes cast by these individual are legitimate, at least with the current
EPIC systems. There are lots of 1 votes cast for a variety of
products.
3) is there a way to restrict this type of
voting in the future.
I can understand the "purity" of your position, but if the
goal is to have credible ratings and the company responsible for creating a
particular vote or set of votes agrees to have them removed then I think we
should consider doing it. It should be harder for the company/plug-in being
rated to get votes thrown out, but there should be a process by which the EPIC
Council looks at such requests and makes a determination.
>>>> I agree if we all believe
these votes were cast by an employee by Instantiations and you ask us to remove
them, then we should delete them. However, ‘if’ this
might be a random person, then I think it is less clear.
From: phoenix-epic-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:phoenix-epic-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Taylor
Sent: September 18, 2006 1:01 PM
To: The
EPIC component of Phoenix
Cc: 'Mik Kersten'
Subject: Re: [phoenix-epic-dev]
FW: bogus rankings on EPIC
All,
I read with concern the message from Mik Kersten. As all of you on the EPIC
Council know, I am very concerned with the legitimacy of the ranking system and
am among those pushing most strongly for making it better.
At Instantiations we have an explicit, written policy that prohibits
our employees from ranking either our own products or those of others on EPIC.
We do this although we are fully aware that it is common practice in the
industry for those with a vested interest to vote for their own products and
against competitive products. We do this because a) we believe our products can
win on their own merit, and b) we know how angry it makes us when a competitor
unjustly slams our ratings (an unfortunately regular occurrence).
That said, we have a couple of dozen employees and its entirely possible that
the trickle of votes Mik references came from our IP address. We vigilantly
watch for this and constantly reinforce our company policy...but violations of
that policy have certainly occurred. In every case where we could identify the
source we have appropriately disciplined the person responsible. We will
continue to do this and if Mik or anyone else can point us to an offender we
will enforce our company policy.
Instantiations' internal policies aside, I wonder what makes these
votes inherently "bad"? Are plug-in vendors officially
restricted from voting for their own products on EPIC? Not that I know of. What
alerted Mik to these votes? Maybe if we knew we could watch that data source
and use it to enforce our own company policies.
In Mik's data I count 17 votes over a 5 month period involving about a
dozen different products. Certainly not enough to swing ratings much if at all.
WindowBuilder, our highest volume product (and the only one in the EPIC top
10), has literally thousands of votes, so the one in the questionable data set
had no practical effect. Our other products in the data set have a smaller vote
count, but there are still not enough votes to affect the ratings in a
meaningful way.
I have to say that even given the many discussions we've had, and are
continuing to have, at the EPIC Council about improving the ranking system and
protecting it from those who would game it...these votes wouldn't make it onto
our radar screen. What the Council is trying to do is remove the possibility of
significant, illegitimate ranking. We have to rely on the community to alert us
to small, infrequent misuses of the ranking system, and for that I thank Mik.
I'm curious, why Mik's previous emails didn't get the visibility they deserve?
Instantiations would like to be alerted anytime any gaming is going on with our
listed products or if it is suspected that our employees are voting in an
unsavory manner.
Regards,
MikeT
PS. We would be perfectly happy if all the votes referenced by Mik were
removed from the database.
At 9:51 AM -0400 9/18/06, Ian Skerrett wrote:
All,
Mik Kersten sent me an e-mail complaining
about some of the rankings that have been made on EPIC. I think we need
to decide how we want to respond to Mik's concerns.
Btw, Mik agreed for me to post his
original e-mail on the mailing list. Please copy him on any replies,
since he has not subscribed to this list.
Thanks
Ian
Ian Skerrett
Director of Marketing
Eclipse Foundation, Inc.
Tel: 613-224-9461 ext. 227
Fax: 613-224-5172
ian.skerrett@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.eclipse.org
Blog: http://ianskerrett.blogspot.com/
From: Mik Kersten [mailto:beatmik@xxxxxxx]
Sent: September 15, 2006 2:38 PM
To: 'Ian Skerrett'
Subject: bogus rankings on EPIC
Hi Ian,
Could you give me the email address of someone
responsible for EPIC? I have submitted 3 email/web complaints of bogus
rankings trying to bring up Instantiations products and bump others near them
on the top-10 down. I still have received no response and the bogus
ranking is continuing, e.g.:
http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Web_Links&file=index&req=ShowRaterDetails&userid=&hostname=68.178.73.218
If these kinds of problems with anonymous rakings
are not addressed pro-actively by EPIC abuse like this is likely to continue,
and someone could blog about this and make EPIC look untrustworthy.
Mik
--
Mik Kersten, http://kerstens.org/mik
Mylar Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylar
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--
----------------------------------------
Mike Taylor
President and CEO
Instantiations, Inc.
Power Tools for Professional Software Developers
Voice: (503) 598-4911
mike_taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.instantiations.com
_______________________________________________
phoenix-epic-dev mailing list
phoenix-epic-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/phoenix-epic-dev
--
----------------------------------------
Mike Taylor
President and CEO
Instantiations, Inc.
Power Tools for Professional Software Developers
Voice: (503) 598-4911
mike_taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.instantiations.com
