Written by Deck Knight. Approved by (HeaLnDeaL, Birkal, DougJustDoug)
CAP Policy Thread: Reviewing Anti-Manipulation Policies
Moderator Note: The inherent nature of this thread discusses the buffer zone between good conduct in CAP and behavior actionable by CAP Moderators, so please conduct yourself accordingly when making posts.
For as long as there have been contentious polls, CAP has had policies against manipulation. The CAP Moderation staff does investigate and act on any incidences of manipulation using methods that will not be discussed. It is the CAP Staff’s policy to reverse all detected manipulations and remove the campaigned-for votes from the thread. Any additional actions are taken as deemed necessary by moderator discretion.
Our current rule dates back from a Policy Review thread in 2013:
CAP Staff does not discuss the issue of campaigning itself or poll manipulations during projects for two reasons:
1) We do not want to give potential abusers either the idea to campaign in the first place or a roadmap on how to avoid detection.
2) It is a massive distraction to have people questioning the integrity of polls themselves, and therefore the heavily democratic nature of our CAP process.
Most of this focus recently has been on flavor polls, wherein to protect CAP’s image and optics we remove what staff deems “Troll Submissions” and other submissions that could lead to legal trouble (like say naming CAP 19 “Snapple,” a registered trademark.) However, over the past three CAPs we have had issues with different parts of the site “block voting” for their preferences utilizing campaign tactics.
Campaigning, broadly defined: Campaigning is any attempt to influence the vote of others within the polling period. Campaigning explicitly requests or suggests voting a certain way in a poll. This is in contrast to discussion, wherein a person might argue the benefits or drawbacks of one of the options without asking people to vote for or against that option (usually only applies to competitive polls). It is considered Campaigning whether you are doing it for your own submission or for others, with or without their knowledge.
Why do we prohibit campaigning?:
Per the last policy review thread, we generally consider campaigning to be against the principles of CAP. The principle here mainly being that people should follow the discussions and make an informed vote.
Many of our best contributors spent all of their free time actually creating their submission, and do not have time during the actual polling phase to drum up support. If campaigning is allowed, then someone who did not “work as hard” on their submission but does have the time to try and pull in votes for it, they end up winning. In short, campaigning itself becomes a separate part of the process whereby to secure a win you pull people who are otherwise uninvested in that project to win a popularity contest. This makes campaigning a distinct and separate skill from submitting.
Questions For This Thread:
Out first set of questions are general questions:
What should be our policy regarding campaigning?
Our current policy exists because this matter was discussed previously (and even before then). Surrounding issues like what qualifies as a troll submission have been left to moderator discretion and are not up for review in this thread. We're interested in identifying if there is still a consensus against campaigning, what reasons people have for or against that policy, and how to handle future incidences of manipulation.
Should we publicize our anti-campaigning policy more widely?
After a few issues that occurred this CAP, we made it a point to add our anti-campaigning policy onto all of the polls. As stated upthread, the reason CAP Staff has generally avoided mentioning this policy heavily is we did not even want to plant the seed for people to get “creative” about winning polls. Our preference is people see the way to win a CAP poll is a combination of persuasiveness and responsiveness in the discussion / WIP Submission threads. Making it a rarely stated but publicly precedented and enforced policy has achieved this outcome fairly effectively, and with relatively minimal consequences for people who violate it inadvertently. The more the policy is publicized, the more severely CAP Staff will have to punish it.
The second set of questions revolves around how aware we should make the community of attempts at manipulation, assuming the same or similar policy:
For context on these questions, current Staff Policy operates this way: Let's say there are 17 votes for A and 15 for B, but 4 of A's votes were determined to be brought in from campaigning. Currently the mods silently strike the 4, making it 13 to 15, and the public never knows that campaigning happened. The person(s) who instigated the campaign do not retain their own personal vote(s).
Should votes known to be brought into a poll from the efforts of campaigning be deleted?
(Please note, the tallying methods we use for polls do identify the total number of posts. Invalid posts would be manually removed and accounted for in determining a majority or plurality.)
Should anyone who is caught campaigning lose their own vote in the poll? What about their ability to vote in future polls?
Basically, should attempts to campaign continue to impose a cost on the person's own personal vote.
Should the mods inform the public of any or all impacts that known campaigning had on a poll? (Note that this deals with the results of the poll and the mods are pretty much never going to discuss how the campaigning itself was organized/how it took place or even who was involved.)
The chief concern here are that people have previously campaigned for an option they like without the knowledge of the actual person that made the submission. Knowing how many people attempted to manipulate for X submission may unfairly characterize that submitter when they had no knowledge and did nothing wrong. We're just looking for feedback and consensus here.
As stated throughout the thread, the reason CAP Staff presently keeps most of this information private is because CAP cannot function if participants believe the polls we use to decide all aspects of our CAP Projects are themselves flawed or subject to unaddressed manipulation. If we introduce information vaguely it creates more suspicions and problems. If we are exceedingly specific it can unduly color submitters who had no part in a separately coordinated campaign for their submission.
Manipulation does happen though, and one of our fundamental principles in CAP is to leave the nature of our process, including what constitutes legal voting methods and tactics, up to our community.
CAP Policy Thread: Reviewing Anti-Manipulation Policies
Moderator Note: The inherent nature of this thread discusses the buffer zone between good conduct in CAP and behavior actionable by CAP Moderators, so please conduct yourself accordingly when making posts.
For as long as there have been contentious polls, CAP has had policies against manipulation. The CAP Moderation staff does investigate and act on any incidences of manipulation using methods that will not be discussed. It is the CAP Staff’s policy to reverse all detected manipulations and remove the campaigned-for votes from the thread. Any additional actions are taken as deemed necessary by moderator discretion.
Our current rule dates back from a Policy Review thread in 2013:
CAP Staff does not discuss the issue of campaigning itself or poll manipulations during projects for two reasons:
1) We do not want to give potential abusers either the idea to campaign in the first place or a roadmap on how to avoid detection.
2) It is a massive distraction to have people questioning the integrity of polls themselves, and therefore the heavily democratic nature of our CAP process.
Most of this focus recently has been on flavor polls, wherein to protect CAP’s image and optics we remove what staff deems “Troll Submissions” and other submissions that could lead to legal trouble (like say naming CAP 19 “Snapple,” a registered trademark.) However, over the past three CAPs we have had issues with different parts of the site “block voting” for their preferences utilizing campaign tactics.
Campaigning, broadly defined: Campaigning is any attempt to influence the vote of others within the polling period. Campaigning explicitly requests or suggests voting a certain way in a poll. This is in contrast to discussion, wherein a person might argue the benefits or drawbacks of one of the options without asking people to vote for or against that option (usually only applies to competitive polls). It is considered Campaigning whether you are doing it for your own submission or for others, with or without their knowledge.
Why do we prohibit campaigning?:
Per the last policy review thread, we generally consider campaigning to be against the principles of CAP. The principle here mainly being that people should follow the discussions and make an informed vote.
Many of our best contributors spent all of their free time actually creating their submission, and do not have time during the actual polling phase to drum up support. If campaigning is allowed, then someone who did not “work as hard” on their submission but does have the time to try and pull in votes for it, they end up winning. In short, campaigning itself becomes a separate part of the process whereby to secure a win you pull people who are otherwise uninvested in that project to win a popularity contest. This makes campaigning a distinct and separate skill from submitting.
Questions For This Thread:
Out first set of questions are general questions:
What should be our policy regarding campaigning?
Our current policy exists because this matter was discussed previously (and even before then). Surrounding issues like what qualifies as a troll submission have been left to moderator discretion and are not up for review in this thread. We're interested in identifying if there is still a consensus against campaigning, what reasons people have for or against that policy, and how to handle future incidences of manipulation.
Should we publicize our anti-campaigning policy more widely?
After a few issues that occurred this CAP, we made it a point to add our anti-campaigning policy onto all of the polls. As stated upthread, the reason CAP Staff has generally avoided mentioning this policy heavily is we did not even want to plant the seed for people to get “creative” about winning polls. Our preference is people see the way to win a CAP poll is a combination of persuasiveness and responsiveness in the discussion / WIP Submission threads. Making it a rarely stated but publicly precedented and enforced policy has achieved this outcome fairly effectively, and with relatively minimal consequences for people who violate it inadvertently. The more the policy is publicized, the more severely CAP Staff will have to punish it.
The second set of questions revolves around how aware we should make the community of attempts at manipulation, assuming the same or similar policy:
For context on these questions, current Staff Policy operates this way: Let's say there are 17 votes for A and 15 for B, but 4 of A's votes were determined to be brought in from campaigning. Currently the mods silently strike the 4, making it 13 to 15, and the public never knows that campaigning happened. The person(s) who instigated the campaign do not retain their own personal vote(s).
Should votes known to be brought into a poll from the efforts of campaigning be deleted?
(Please note, the tallying methods we use for polls do identify the total number of posts. Invalid posts would be manually removed and accounted for in determining a majority or plurality.)
Should anyone who is caught campaigning lose their own vote in the poll? What about their ability to vote in future polls?
Basically, should attempts to campaign continue to impose a cost on the person's own personal vote.
Should the mods inform the public of any or all impacts that known campaigning had on a poll? (Note that this deals with the results of the poll and the mods are pretty much never going to discuss how the campaigning itself was organized/how it took place or even who was involved.)
The chief concern here are that people have previously campaigned for an option they like without the knowledge of the actual person that made the submission. Knowing how many people attempted to manipulate for X submission may unfairly characterize that submitter when they had no knowledge and did nothing wrong. We're just looking for feedback and consensus here.
As stated throughout the thread, the reason CAP Staff presently keeps most of this information private is because CAP cannot function if participants believe the polls we use to decide all aspects of our CAP Projects are themselves flawed or subject to unaddressed manipulation. If we introduce information vaguely it creates more suspicions and problems. If we are exceedingly specific it can unduly color submitters who had no part in a separately coordinated campaign for their submission.
Manipulation does happen though, and one of our fundamental principles in CAP is to leave the nature of our process, including what constitutes legal voting methods and tactics, up to our community.
