Policy Review Reviewing Anti-Manipulation Policies

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Deck Knight

Blast Off At The Speed Of Light! That's Right!
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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:

Asking for votes for your submission or for the submissions of others is not allowed. Anyone found to have done so risks punishment at the moderation team's discretion. If you find that someone has broken this rule, please contact the CAP moderation team with your evidence and no one else. Mini-moderation of this rule is also considered a serious offense and can be punished.
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.
 
As you have stated, it's quite reasonable to let campaigners lose their own votes in attempt to manipulte the system. However, what if the campaigner is just telling users to vote if they're interested, but not for any particular user's design? That probably would indicate that the user is advertising for the Project instead, so I'm not sure if that counts.
 

SHSP

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Apologies for not posting much, rough few weeks of school and all. Anyway, to the topic at hand...

Regarding campaigning itself: I stand with the current policy. Campaigning can be highly abusable; the idea itself lends to a disruption of the process's goals. Campaigning can turn our goal of the "best" option as a community into "who can campaign the most for whatever option." This stands against the whole idea of the CAP process; no longer are we supporting the best decision of a concept, we're supporting the idea of the user we like the most or that campaigns the most and not necessarily adhering to the concept in the slightest.

Regarding the publicizing of our anti-campaigning policy: An emphatic yes. The sentiment about people being encouraged to or coming up with the idea of campaigning after seeing it be denounced, with the punishment of the action also being explained, seems illogical. The more we get it out there, 1: the less it happens accidentally as people know to stray away from it, and 2: the more we can punish it and have less leeway in cases. Publicizing both the stance against it, and the punishment for it, creates a precedent and deterrent against future actions.

Deleting votes: Another emphatic yes. Both of the campaigner's and of the campaign-starter. Keep the illegal votes out of interfering with the process.

Informing public: A less emphatic yes, but still a yes. This one is difficult for me; I see both sides and agree for the most part with both arguments, but in efforts of publicizing the stance of anti-campaigning I suggest we take on, I support informing the public. Specific information seems better than vagueness here; it feels better to explain the campaigning effort in detail rather then call the whole process into question with vagueness.
 
In my opinion, though I don't think trolly posts should be allowed in polls I do not think that campaigning is that bad, even if it is not good, after all nobody has to go along with the campaigner's plan. In art submissions there might be a person with a great idea and no artistic talent, and another person who is an artist that wants to make an art sub but cannot think of anything, which has probably happened before but the idea makers cannot post their ideas because it would be campaigning.
 

HeaLnDeaL

Let's Keep Fighting
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The above scenario that darmico describes really isn't campaigning. The art thread doesn't allow collaboration. That's kinda something different than what we're talking about here.

As far as punishments for campaigning, I think it's reasonable to delete the vote of the campaigner. If there's no deterrent to stop someone from campaigning then it just encourages them to get away with it. As a mod, every instance of campaigning that I personally know of involved the offender feeling incredibly passionate about their favorite item on the slate. It is very clear that their goal is to make their favorite item win. If we don't delete votes of the offender, I would imagine some campaigners would think the chance of adding in extra votes would be worth the risk of getting caught because campaigning only helps their cause or produces a neutral result. By deleting the offender's own vote, it means that his/her favorite item loses a vote, which hurts his/her cause for campaigning in the first place.

I also think that it would be good if from here on out, anyone caught campaigning loses the ability to vote in any CAP related function for X period of time. I'm not really super concerned with exactly how long. Maybe for a few months, maybe for a whole CAP cycle, idk. I really don't think most people who campaign mind an infraction point or two as long as their favorite wins, so we need other methods to deter crime.

I really, really don't want to turn into a Reagan here, but I think upping punishments slightly could help keep the project safer. There are definitely cases where people simply haven't read the rules or weren't aware. Therefore obviously the first step is making our rules against campaigning more public. The mods have already started to do this starting in the middle of last CAP. Personally, I really want to see a CAP specific rule displaying our stance against campaigning on the top of every page (in the blue rectangle under the nav bar that cycles through news/rules). I know this is possible because firebot has some custom headings in that section, and I really see no reason why we shouldn't use it to advertise some of our most important rules. Our number one concern should be to make sure people know our voting rules so that people don't accidentally break them.

EDIT: Just to be clear, this thread is not the place to discuss what behavior should result in an infraction. The mods certainly don't need permission from a PRC thread that spells out what we can and cannot infract. Rather, when talking about "voting consequences" in this thread, we are largely talking about deleting votes of people who get caught and maybe preventing such people from voting again via a "time out" period. Infractions are the topic of mod discussion, not to be discussed here. But seeing as voting is a huge part of the community here in CAP, talking about voting punishments and what we deem to be appropriate as a community is applicable.
 
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Conni

katharsis
What should be our policy regarding campaigning?
I think that campaigning should be kept prohibited; we want users to vote for what they think and not to be influenced by other users since that would just basically mean voting for the same thing once for that user. It also wouldn't be fair since all users have their opinion and that they should vote for things THEY want to vote for, not to be influenced by someone else with convincible reasons.

Should we publicize our anti-campaigning policy more widely?
Yes, it should be known that manipulation is not allowed and I think that in each poll, there should be a reminder in the rules where it states that you should only vote what you think. Voters can read the OP and find this, and they would know not to manipulate other people in voting for the same thing they did so that choice can win just because they want it to, this can possibly stop sensible users from manipulating and it saves the staff's time to deal with those who don't read the message. It should say something like please consider your own selected choice when voting.

Should votes known to be brought into a poll from the efforts of campaigning be deleted?
Yes. We don't want to influence other users to vote for a choice that is not formed from their own opinion, we don't want a stack of votes for one choice just because this one guy comes up with reasons to vote for one poll, we want votes that are sincere and that is formed from the voter's own opinion to form a truthful outcome.

Should anyone who is caught campaigning lose their own vote in the poll? What about their ability to vote in future polls?
I think that anyone who is caught campaigning should lose their vote, as if the warning not to manipulate others is implemented into poll threads and users who campaign still attempt to campaign after reading the warning or ignoring it should lose their vote, as they clearly have not read the important rules or just simply ignore it and just want to troll or want their vote to be chosen, which is unacceptable since the OP is important, the rules are important and that they are to be heeded and not ignored.

Should the mods inform the public of any or all impacts that known campaigning had on a poll?
I think that the mods shouldn't inform the public of impacts that detected campaigning had on a poll because we don't want other campaigners to know if campaigning was successful in changing the results of a poll, of course if there was no campaigning it could discourage other campaigners, but it generally shouldn't because we don't want users to know the effects it has because we want polls to be as fair as possible.
 

Ignus

Copying deli meat to hard drive
It's been said a billion, billion times that CAP is a terrible way to design a Pokemon. Because we make decisions in terms of majority rule, I have issues in general with throwing away any vote created by a human being. It should be up to our moderators to decide what an informed vote and what an uninformed, almost robotic vote looks like, but any votes removed from the project for this reason should hereon be publicized. This is a 'two birds with one stone' approach: Not only does it help us trust those in charge of the legitimacy of the project better, but acts as a secondary punishment for the offenders. Uninformed voting is one of the project's biggest 'enemies' - and people who are encouraging this behavior should be called out as such. This gives the rule more publicity, too. If the CAP community disagrees with the decision, that's a good thing. Since when have CAP contributors shied away from an argument?

I can understand the mentality of wanting to take care of these problems quietly, but we'll seriously get burned if people notice votes being removed from polls without any sort of explanation. That hurts the communities trust in the project way more than some third party trying to manipulate the project.

I'm not really sure how to put the importance of making this stuff public any better, so here's the part of conversation I had with Imanalt and Heal yesterday about this stuff.

[00:44:23] +Ignus: The biggest issue (imo) with campaigning is that it hurts the legitimacy of the project and hurts the trust of other voters
[00:45:12] +Ignus: Even when the manipulation is caught people may have seen the votes before that
[00:45:33] +Ignus: and might think to themselves 'hey where'd all those votes for whoever go?'
[00:46:18] +Ignus: because the legitimacy of the project is at stake I think it makes sense to ban people for the entirety of the project
[00:46:57] Imanalt: Ignus idk
[00:47:20] Imanalt: lots of things affect who wins a poll
[00:47:26] Imanalt: campaigning is going to be a smallish effect
[00:47:30] +Ignus: Well yeah
[00:47:36] +Ignus: but that doesn't make this any less real
[00:47:42] Imanalt: sure but
[00:47:55] Imanalt: it probably doesnt change the legitimacy of a project anymore thn if a poll falls on a weekend or not
[00:48:37] +Ignus: I think what I mean by legitimacy is people's actual trust in the project rather than the vote outcome
[00:48:58] +Ignus: I wouldn't want to participate in a project where I felt my vote wasn't important or could be removed
[00:50:01] +Ignus: We're a community first and foremost and we should be preserving the image first and foremost
[00:50:11] +Ignus: since that's all CAP has over other fakemon projects
[00:50:23] Imanalt: what image lol
[00:50:29] +Ignus: though I guess saying we have a 'good image' isn't entirely true lol
[00:50:52] +Ignus: but we're still the community with the least garbage
[00:50:58] +Ignus: out of the ones that make fakemons
[00:51:36] Imanalt: i woudl say what separates us traditionally from other fakemon projects is a) an emphasis on general participation and b) an emphasis on competitive discussion
[00:51:54] +Ignus: Which is why I'm trying to preserve A I guess
[00:51:54] Imanalt: i think most would agree b hasbeen fading (most of smogon not necc most of cap community)
[00:51:56] Imanalt: yeah
[00:52:12] Imanalt: but chasing off potentially valuable contributos can impact b as well though
[00:53:05] +Ignus: It's arguable whether or not people who are encouraging uninformed voting are important but I get where you're coming from
[00:53:18] +Ignus: anyone invested enough to vote should generally be welcomed
[00:53:57] #HeaLnDeaL: well, not *anyone*, but almost anyone invested that much yeah
[00:54:08] +Ignus: You get what I mean though ye
[00:55:09] +Ignus: Like so I find it kinda backwards when on onehand we're trying to preserve legitimacy on one hand by removing campaign votes
[00:55:32] +Ignus: but on the other hand aren't publicizing it when it could seriously hurt legitimacy
[00:55:42] #HeaLnDeaL: removing campaigned votes DOES preserve the legitimacy of the poll
[00:55:51] +Ignus: That's what I'm saying
[00:56:15] +Ignus: I'm more worried that not publicizing those decisions will look like 'omg cap mods removed votes wtf'
[00:56:36] +Ignus: sorry I worded that shitty ^^
[00:56:37] #HeaLnDeaL: the mods are your janitors
[00:56:41] +Ignus: no doubt
[00:56:48] +Ignus: yall are great at it too
[00:57:00] +Ignus: but that doesn't mean you shouldn't tell us when theres a gas leak
[00:57:06] +Ignus: votes are a BIG DEAL in CAP
[00:57:15] +Ignus: we should know when shit is fucky
[00:58:03] +Ignus: I perfectly understand that cleaning up garbage posts and mean stuff is your primary job and goal
[00:58:16] Imanalt: HeaLnDeaL its always possible you dont know all votes affected by campaigning
[00:58:18] +Ignus: but this is something that looks scary from the outside
[00:58:22] Imanalt: anyways im going to bed i have class int he mroning lol
[00:58:27] +Ignus: goodnight yo
[00:58:28] #HeaLnDeaL: err wouldn't call that our primary goal. first and foremost we want a fun project.
[00:58:35] +Ignus: Well yeah
[00:58:37] +Ignus: same here
As far as I'm concerned the punishment should be up to our Mod team. It's not PRC's job to decide on punishments - if you guys think it's in our best interest to remove the manipulator's vote, do it. If you don't, don't. The rest of us, even if we do have opinion on what you should do, chances are we don't know the full story. As someone against holding uninformed opinions, I'm not going to give one here.
 

Bughouse

Like ships in the night, you're passing me by
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Years ago I would have laughed off this topic because I didn't see it as a concern. But we've had too many instances with obviously malicious intent on the part of outsiders to CAP, that I do think CAP should update its rules here to get tougher. These rules harm no one but serious troublemaker.
Before I would have said art is subjective and how can you guess a voter's motives. But that's been resolved by shared experience seeing it happen.

So..... While I'm sure I and others could still go on and on about how art is subjective, I ultimately want to say that it is so only to a certain point. Most people agree there is such thing as objectively good art and objectively bad art. See for example Hume's Of The Standard Of Taste, which argues the point in an eloquent way, though with antiquated language since it's old as hell. or a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Dissertations#Of_the_Standard_of_Taste He basically argues that there's a difference between "Do I like it?" and "Is it good?" and I think most people agree that those are different questions and that some art is objectively better than other art.

Given that that is my personal view on aesthetics, I do think there are such things as "good" and "bad" votes on flavor steps. But I would not eliminate any options from the voting slate. Bad submissions may have been made in earnest, not as trolls, and they deserve to be slated, like any other legal submission.

There should be nothing punishable about submitting a bad piece of art, nor for someone just voting "badly" on their own, but I would have nothing against a CAP version of firebanning users who lead campaigns for objectively bad submissions (note that the submission they campaign for doesn't have to be intentional troll - again, there are plenty of bad, but earnest, art and name submissions that campaigners could gather votes for). I would only punish the campaigner, and I would punish them harshly with an indefinite fireban, pending appeal if they really care (I doubt they will). It's much easier to tell if someone has campaigned for votes for a bad submission than to tell if the submission was made earnestly or with malice. Oh and I would also delete any votes clearly derived from the campaigner's efforts.
 

jas61292

used substitute
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This is a tough issue, and I don't really have a solid opinion on a lot of the questions, because I really have no idea what is best. That said, there are a few questions I do have opinions on. First off, with regard to what our policy in general should be, we absolutely should have campaigning and other forms of manipulation be against the rules. Even if we had no good way to enforce such a rule, such practices are clearly against the principles of the project, and our rules should reflect that. Sometimes just having a rule will stop people who otherwise wouldn't realize that what they are doing is wrong. In addition to this, I absolutely think we need to make this policy more public. If any rule, but especially one so important as this, is not well known to the community, that is a bad thing. If our policy is against poll manipulation, we should say so clearly and obviously in the OP of every single poll we do.

Now, as far as what to do when manipulation is found... that is what I am not so sure of. While I would definitely think that we should eliminate votes derived from manipulation, whether or not we make what happens known all the details of what happens... I really don't know. Typically on something like this I would tend to lean towards a case by case "let the mods decide" policy, but A) that has not always worked out the best in the past, and B) as a mod myself, I feel like that is a cheap answer. Why should we leave it up to people like me if I don't even know what I think is right?

That said, my uncertainty is only with regard to how we handle the issue with regard to who get to know what. When it comes to any actual punishment (not like vote deletion, but like infractions or whatnot) I absolutely think that needs to stay as moderator discretion. Moderators are specific people picked partially because they are trusted to make that kind of decision, as Ignus said, punishment is not the purview of the PRC.
 

DetroitLolcat

Maize and Blue Badge Set 2014-2017
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I agree with maintaining our current policy against campaigning and strongly believe we need to publicize this policy more. As mentioned in the OP, campaigning and submitting are two distinct skills and CAP polls should be rewarding the latter, not the former. Personally, I believe most violations of this rule are inadvertent and can be remedied by a reminder in all polling threads stating not to campaign for someone's submission. In whatever reminder we add, we should remind voters the difference between campaigning and merely discussing submissions online.

If we don't publicize the policy well, a new user might walk into a thread, see an election of some sort is taking place, and go campaign for their favorite choice. Someone new to CAP won't know our prior issues with campaigning and won't realize why campaigning is discouraged. If we don't publicize the policy, we make our polling process vulnerable to inadvertent manipulation. I believe the "publicizing the policy will incentivize 'getting creative'" mindset is overly cautious; we can put in our reminders not to test the moderators' patience with this policy and that skating the line will result in punishment more often than not. But it should be the policy makers' burden to draft and publish rules, not the voters' job to interpret intentionally unclear policy.

Obviously I agree that votes brought in from clear-cut campaigning should be deleted. I do not believe those voters should be additionally punished; I see the individuals brought in as a result of campaigning as victims of manipulation, not as violators of policy.

I do not believe an individual that campaigns should always lose their vote because I do not see one vote as a substantial deterrent to campaigning. A "campaigners lose their vote" policy essentially makes potential campaigners "wager" one vote against however many people they campaign towards. If a person wants to bring in five, ten, or more of their friends to vote for an option then the benefits of a successful campaign will greatly outweigh the cost of losing their vote, rendering that punishment useless. I do not believe minor inadvertent campaigning should cost an individual their vote. For more severe or repeat violations of this rule I support vote deletion and revocation of voting privileges in future polls for a predetermined period.

On the last question, I'm ambivalent as to whether publicizing impacts from campaigning is a good idea. On one hand, transparency in the system will increase the integrity of the mods and better inform the public about what is not acceptable practice. On the other, publicizing campaigning incidents may cast a negative light on the submitter even if they had nothing to do with the campaign (which is likely. Submitters rarely are behind a campaigning effort). I lean in favor of transparency, but I do not feel strongly either way on this issue. I would like to hear what prominent contributors, particularly art contributors, feel about this issue because they'll be impacted the most by the policy.
 
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HeaLnDeaL

Let's Keep Fighting
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DetroitLolcat said:
I do not believe an individual that campaigns should always lose their vote because I do not see one vote as a substantial deterrent to campaigning. A "campaigners lose their vote" policy essentially makes potential campaigners "wager" one vote against however many people they campaign towards. If a person wants to bring in five, ten, or more of their friends to vote for an option then the benefits of a successful campaign will greatly outweigh the cost of losing their vote, rendering that punishment useless. I do not believe minor inadvertent campaigning should cost an individual their vote. For more severe or repeat violations of this rule I support vote deletion and revocation of voting privileges in future polls for a predetermined period.
I just don't think this is how it really works. It isn't a wager of the campaigner's one vote compared to the votes gained from friends (well I mean it is kind of a wager against getting caught or not but I mostly adamantly disagree with the line that says it renders the punishment useless). If the campaigner is caught, then all associated votes brought in from the campaigning are deleted. This means it does NOT become a situation where a campaigner brought in 10 votes but loses their one vote, dealing with a net increase of 9 votes for X submission. Rather, it's the campaigner bringing in 10 votes, those 10 votes being deleted AND the campaigner's vote being deleted, resulting in a net loss of 1 vote for X submission. And as the OP states, this has been the current system.
 

DetroitLolcat

Maize and Blue Badge Set 2014-2017
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I just don't think this is how it really works. It isn't a wager of the campaigner's one vote compared to the votes gained from friends (well I mean it is kind of a wager against getting caught or not but I mostly adamantly disagree with the line that says it renders the punishment useless). If the campaigner is caught, then all associated votes brought in from the campaigning are deleted. This means it does NOT become a situation where a campaigner brought in 10 votes but loses their one vote, dealing with a net increase of 9 votes for X submission. Rather, it's the campaigner bringing in 10 votes, those 10 votes being deleted AND the campaigner's vote being deleted, resulting in a net loss of 1 vote for X submission. And as the OP states, this has been the current system.
Oh, pardon me if I was unclear. I'm aware that votes from campaigning are deleted and strongly believe that should be the case. As you said, right now if a person campaigns and is caught, the submission they campaigned for loses one net vote. If we did not delete the campaigner's vote and the campaigner is caught (as I suggested in my post), the submission they campaigned for has a net change of zero votes. I simply don't believe that the difference between the submission losing one vote and losing zero votes is much of a deterrent to campaigning because the "reward" for not getting caught is typically much more than one vote. What I'm saying is that I believe there are cases where the campaigner's vote is still legitimate even if their campaigning is not. In essence, I don't think an individual campaigning necessarily compromises their own vote, just the votes of those brought in by the campaign.
 

HeaLnDeaL

Let's Keep Fighting
is an Artistis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a CAP Contributor Alumnus
My main problem with allowing the caught campaigner to keep their vote is that it creates a situation where no matter what, even if they are caught, there is no chance that their favorite submission will lose a vote. Campaigners, from my belief, are motivated by vote counts. Essentially, if someone doesn't care about other forms of punishment, allowing them to keep their vote means that there is literally no downside to try and campaign. I think it's an incredibly flawed system to leave no net downside even if someone is caught because it just encourages people to try. It's essentially like asking a person who committed grand larceny to give everything back that they stole without giving them jail time. If there's no net downside to getting caught and only upsides to not getting caught then there's no reason for motivated individuals to manipulate the poll.

And I do somewhat agree that a -1 compared to a +10 is a rather small deterrent, but it is still one. I'm also interested in possibly increasing the deterrent by putting caught campaigners on a time-out period that doesn't allow them to vote in the next 3ish polls. But I think it's just foolish to rely on infractions as the only deterrent because I think a lot of campaigners would think that getting a winning poll is worth far more than a single infraction point. Once again, the topic of infraction giving is mod only territory, but I'm only bringing it up now because I think it's inefficient in certain cases and we really should have other deterrents to keep the system in check. The campaigner losing his/her vote I believe is absolutely necessary to be kept for this reason. I'm not going to be mad or anything if the time-out period idea doesn't gain any traction, but removing the loss of the campaigner's vote brings us backwards so far that it compromises the integrity of our polls further rather than helping them. If there's no net loss to try, then people will try more.
 

Deck Knight

Blast Off At The Speed Of Light! That's Right!
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Conclusion:

This thread had strong support for our existing policy, with the key change people wanted to ensure it was publicized more. We will update all our thread OPs to reflect this desire and ensure it is posted in each one going forward.

Thank you for your input on this very important subject.
 
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