Early morning 5am, I was pondering on whether to open/close a comment (reproduced below) on the confession box. I know you guys are tired of the topic of ‘unfairness’ - but it is our duty to address the concern of every participant. I have removed the name of the disgruntled couple so we can focus on the issues raised. The only reason I put this on the blog, is so we can address similar concern from many others. Dear Mr.Sandip & Co. U had / have any professional setup to detect fake voting ? or u intentionally let people cast fake votes ? (Team GDC - No Sir, we did not have any professional setup to detect fake voting, at the point of casting. In fact we didnt know (till GDC) of the 101 ways to cast a fake vote. We are learning more from the comments opened in ‘confession box’. What we did have was a robust data capture mechanism to log every attempt at vote, time stamp, originating IP etc. Once we had the log in place, we knew we could at least detect gross violations using simple algorithms to detect time patterns, originating ID etc, and then trust the human brain.(For e.x. your application had several hundred votes caste from corporate ID “nilwaste.com” in matter of 5 minutes - and that URL links to a web-page for Magnum projects (http://www.nilwaste.com), where none of the links work. That told us the page was just a decoy. Then we found from a “whois” that nilwaste.com is registered with a gentleman that is possibly your namesake. We also found Nilwaste is a company registered in the UK nilwaste.co.uk - That made the voting pattern suspect, Sir)
(Team GDC - It is a personal choice made by couples to enter TGDC. Whether it is waste of time or great entertainment, is again a personal perspective) how do u compensate the vote losses caused in the earlier stage4 of voting ? isn’t it your responsibility ? (Team GDC - there was no reason to compensate - because none of the votes were lost - unless those were created for bogus IDs. All undelivered emails were re-sent at least twice. We still knew people could have lost a few votes, but the judgement criteria divided voting into slabs - so we knew few losses would not impact anyone’s chances) r u an amateur to start a contest of this magnitude n then mid change the rules n ur so called e-mail infrastructure ? how do u justify the loss caused to genuine people’s time n effort ? (Team GDC - We beefed up the infrastructure - all we did was add a couple more mail gateway providers. No rules were changed. Yes - after pouring over false voting logs and estimating the time, money and effort spent, we now know the loss can’t be justified) How do u justify the inclusion of people in top 100 who have not even completed the application ? (Team GDC - please read an earlier post on this topic titled letter from dilip d’souza) how do u justify the selection of people with fake votes ? (Team GDC - this is a tough one, but we will take it - yes there are people on TOP 100 list who have false votes - we decided that we are going to let people be who have been creative and patient to cast a few dozen odd emails here and there - we also let go of some big guys who used email aliases (gmail) on their corporate IDs - this was a grey area, because we did not know whether the votes were cast with their permission or not -the one group which certainly got penalized are those who tampered corporate vote IDs - these we realized are deliberate malicious attempts to bypass the ‘honor system’ on which we were running the game) Pls let me know y not a legal compensation can be demanded for all such mis-deeds of TGDC ? Kindly note, I talked to Mitsubishi Motors PR n I have requested for the clarifications in this regard. (Team GDC - we have forwarded your Voting logs, Application logs, IP logs to the appropriate authorities to help them understand your issues, if any with TGDC) Hi Team, Whenever something resembling a competition/contenst is attempted, there are all sorts of reactions! BTW…the cardiogram depicting pulse on the home page is so apt a depiction of how we’re feeling! u summed it up in an image - a picture is worth a thousand words! Awaiting results, God bless all! Hi Team, You have really brought the child inside us that wes lost 4 a long time as v are participating in this challenge the heart beat on home page is our real position at this moment well we are ready with our fingers crossed andtrying to Be+ve all the time is what we r doing and did u check your mail is the question on everyone who meets us , r we in? the students are also sooooooooooooooooo excited excited sir, did u check the results let us know the results the colleagues and the heads are telling us but waiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit is the thing we need to do now I have a feeling ALL the issues about voting, time lost, unfair selections will be forgotten come 12PM today. I have a feeling the next 10 days are going to be the biggest draw of TGDC, an ace which they’ve been hiding up their sleeves so far. I have a feeling I will not stay away from this page even after Aug 17th is over. Life will be empty, like the vacuum after the 1st season of IPL ended. No more frantically refreshing pages and raking of brains for creativity. Less than 150 minutes to go and all eyes are on the homepage. ALL THE BEST folks! I am a freelancer and I provide server deployment, tuning, security and migration services to webhosts. I manage close to 1500 domains and have access to them and the servers they run on mostly as superuser. This means that if I as much as had wanted to do it I could have added 5 ids to each domain, used various proxy servers to access the voting pages anonymously at different times of the day/different days, and without even the slightest of doubt being raised I could have managed 7500 votes in a seemingly transparent manner. The 173 which I got legitimately would’ve taken my toll to 7673. Nice and sweet! However this is not life and death. We wanted to take a vacation more like an offsite to discuss stuff which we can’t while going about life at home. We’ve been often told by friends that I write very well and that I take good pictures(this though I must in all fairness handover to Sonali coz she is the one who has the eye for a picture I just do the uploading as I am more vela than her and so all pics show up under my picasa id), I also am credited with a good deal of knowledge of cars and how to drive them sanely(no I don’t speed ever) by my friends on my cars’ forum at yahoo(can’t paste a link as it might cause promotion of a different brand etc.)..... anyways so these two reasons made me apply and I thought well if it works out great otherwise we go on our own expense. Looking at all the fabulous couples in the top100 I am not very confident of making it to the top12, my friends and some clients are, but then I do understand that it’s not simply a matter of a little bit of fancy writing and definitely not about being able to stand on one leg and…..(seriously has anyone attempted doing that…. I have half a mind to but then nyaaaa maybe not) it’s about being outstanding overall and being able to project that through your interactions. Also it’s about being extremely lucky. You need to have done a lot of things right to be on that list. Anyways this comment was about how idiotic it is to think that the people who are running the contest would not have seen through the ruse. I know servers and logs are my bread and butter(and deisel and petrol for the cars). I know how simple it is to figure out these things…. it’s painstaking work as it takes time to sift through the logs but once you have the logic in place you’re through…. then you can process various pattern matches at will. So for those who thought it’s easy to barge your way in think again… and always remember to not underestimate the geek on the other end of the wire -imtiaz We are a couple that by ( what an insurance company might call) acts of God , got super busy just around the same time we should have been campaigning big time. Hi; All said and done any job to be done as its own limitations and there is always a way to beat the system. We Indians are a class apart in this, that is why most software companies have testing centers in India. Indians know and will always find a way. So I think it is very unfair to blame any body or company for trying their best but not able to guarantee a 100%. I know this personally as I have handled a lot many of such competitions very fairly and with all honesty, but still we did make mistakes and did come under fire. But things turn out ok. Pulling off such a big stint is no childs play there there are bound to be mistakes, but lets focus on the work done and let the little mistakes go. All I’d like to say is, let us always focus on the good and be more positively aggressive than negatively aggressive. Our world today suffers more from the passiveness of good people than from the aggressiveness of bad people. Oh team GDC! why oh why do you have the results declaration at 12 pm (or the other at at 1pm)? It is really difficult to concentrate on work. The mornings are such a waste the results are about to be declared. At least 176 souls will get to sleep soundly tonight. May God bless the other 22 poor souls cheers and all the best! NOTHING… Nothing…absoulutely nothing is entering my head now… i’m so jittery… not able to do even normal stuff… unable to sit, stand, walk… 12 minutes… oh god! It is simply not proper blaming or questioning the process. Point raised by the person are commonly pass in every couple’s minds who could not make it to top 100 list. ..and thats it ! as someone rightly mentioned above that we me and manju were amazed to see the pool of wonderful people or say couples .and they were just around somewhere ! ..am right away going to see list of 12 people now !
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