Recently, I have had to do some things that I really hate to do. What could that be? I am glad that you asked. The first is to disqualify members from competing. It is not the first time, but it happens every now and again. Some of the submissions were for articles that were submitted by somebody else. Now, just for clarity, I am not trying to put myself on some moral high ground in judgement of other people's actions. At the same time, I definitely can not give credit for those articles. There is also a penalty involved. It is called the "Making David do extra work because I am scamming" penalty. What happens? Each one is a judgement call and can range from simply not getting points for the submission to being banned from the competition permanently, both of which have actually happened. No Stupid Prizes for you!!!! (spoken in the voice of the Soup Nazi) In the future, USB Missile launchers may be employed.
Being Banned Permanently sounds pretty harsh, doesn't it? There are good reason for penalizing folks for what I call "Point Spamming" (a term I coined). For starters, it is just not fair to everybody else who is competing. Period. Second, on the surface this may appear as a contest, but it is really a reward system for those who contribute to the development community. Doing things like submitting other people's work is in total opposition to that concept. Finally, it is not fair to the people who run websites that people contribute to. One example of how that comes into play is regarding people that join multiple communities all in the same day, or sign up for 50 webcasts in one week, or submit 150 bogus discussion board posts in a day. All of these have happened. Technically, they are valid, but realistically they are not. How is each issue decided? Easy. It is all at the discretion of....me. To summarize
Articles:
a) Submitting your own articles. Great!
b) Submitting somebody elses article: Also Great(as long as you include some type of credit like "Hey here is a cool article I came across!")
c) Submitting somebody elses article as if you actually wrote it yourself - Not that Great.
Communities:
a) Joining somebodies .NET Developers Portal - Great
b) Joining 57 different portals in one afternoon - Not that Great
Discussion Board Postings
a) Answering a question that somebody asked - Great
b) Posting a news story on a discussion board - Great
c) Finding a good news story and posting it on 12 different discussion boards each day - Not that Great
I think you get the picture...