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I think this is really cool - at least two of the contestants are campaigning for their film entry. A key part of being successful in Hollywood is promoting yourself and these two are doing that very well.
St. Louis Indie group - Cyber Talk
Congrats to both for their effort.
When we sat down to figure out how to set up the voting, we were assuming that there would be 20 entries. We figured a 2 week period between votes would insure almost everyone would vote each round as we could send 2 reminder emails each time (one a week).
When the number jumped up to 35, we did not take into account the new total to adjust the voting rules. Because of the number of entries, we are changing the voting to once a week. More often than that and we think many people will not vote each round. This puts the length of the voting about the same as American Idol which seems reasonable.
The Number of Voters
If we have just 500 - 1,000 voters, then this really is who has the most friends registered and that would be a lousy way to have the contest decided. If we have 10,000 voters then we are looking at a real contest based on how good each film is. And at 100,000 we have a real contest. So our hope is between now and April 2 that we get 100,000 or more registered voters.
You can help. Please pass on the registration link and the contest news to anyone and everyone you know. Ask them to register and vote. Post it on web forums, post it in blogs, post it on Digg, post it at work/school. I hope every film student registers because part of supporting each other is participating in the selection of the best video in contests like this.
Vote Fraud
No system is perfect. Our goal is just to be better than Florida (which should not be hard). We are going to look intelligently at the domains with large numbers of emails. If it's ibm.com they are legit as the few people at IBM that can create additional email addresses would not risk their job over it. If it's stanford.edu we will take a fast look as there are again very few people that can add email addresses but if some are students, they might do it. If it's {LastNameHere}Family.com we're going to flush it.
And the IP address comes in useful here too. If the same IP address is used for multiple emails at multiple domains, someone is playing games. There are other things we might discover when we look at the totals. If we are unsure and the registries have valid phone numbers, we will call and ask.
We're not trying to stop someone who has 2 votes (say gmail.com and yahoo.com). We understand that a small company can have 5 - 10 people voting and they will all have 1 IP address from their firewall. Or 5 - 10 students in an apartment sharing a connection.
Our fundamental assumption is that we will get 10,000 or more voters and that the double voting will then be a very small percentage of the total and will not decide the winners.
Over a year ago we released Enemy Nations for free and the response was so large it max'ed out the bandwidth at the co-lo facility we used for a bit. In a little over a month 2 terrabytes was downloaded.
This past Christmas we released Page 2 Stage as free-ware. (We are now 100% an enterprise software company.) Page 2 Stage is a much smaller program so no bandwidth problems this time. But in under 3 months it has been downloaded over 70,000 times. Page 2 Stage is now unquestionably the most popular screen-writing program.
The combination of a quality program and free sure is compelling. Now if only we could sell that many copies of Windward Reports in 3 months :).
Well we finally got the voting set up for the film contest. If you want to vote, you can register here. I wrote the code yesterday - I'm still able to do some programming at times which is still my favorite part of the job. (So here's a chance to comment about the quality of my code.)
If you have any comments about what we have done to minimize vote fraud, please comment here. It's an interesting problem as we don't want to make the process onerous but we also don't want one person with a auto-vote program winning $10,000.00 for their entry.
I am really happy with the videos we got. Yes they're of varying quality. But people put in a significant effort. I think many of them are very good efforts. I will not list my favorites as I have a warped sense of humor.
Thank you to everyone who created an entry and good luck to all.
Update
Please read newer posts, including this one, for responses to comments here and additional information.
Update II
Please read this post for responses to the additional comments here.
