Update to stop submitter from rating their own game

Well, Explorer Exchange has been live for about 24 hours now, and there are now ten games listed, two of which are mine.

A slow, but steady start. Submissions will continue, and perhaps pick up after some time. At least glad the world didn’t implode. It was one of my failure cases.

While watching how things progressed today, I did notice something odd. A game had been given a 5-star rating within minutes of it having been submitted. The possibility of a game being listed, requested, played, and then voted upon within minutes is highly unlikely. Much more likely would be the case that the submitter voted upon his own game.

Now, while I don’t have any “Terms & Conditions” a submitter must agree to at submit-time, such a case clearly contravenes the implicit trust of such a system. So I made my first executive decision: I expunged the vote and quickly wrote up a basic system to stop submitters from voting for their own entries after submitting them.

There are no hard feelings, however. It was a case that I, and those who helped test the site before launch, all didn’t think of. At the very least, it is interesting how quickly users will discover and “game” flaws in a system, a la the Kadish Gallery trick Explorers used when the DRC closed Ae’gura a couple of months back.

Now I consider that it could also be the case that is was a random vote, not by the submitter. Either way, expunging it was still a valid move.

I would like to mention that I do not plan on policing such things from here on out in such detail. I just happened to catch it, as I was watching closely and often. I will only step in and change things in obvious cases of subverting the basic rules of the implied system, which would be very rarely.

I will consider adding some basic “Terms & Conditions” if other issues arise.