Comments
16:56 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
Guys, I would hope by now people would know that we don't pick winners of our own choosing. We're as neutral as Switzerland - you choose 'em, we make 'em. ;-) Frankly, I'm confused myself and our tech team is looking into the issue. Stay tuned! - CZ
17:07 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
I'm sorry if I sounded like I was accusing Z2H of doing anything shady, it's more or less cynicism from people who want to turn another person's own, such as politicians and scriptwriters.
17:10 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
Chief, just to be clear: I wasn't implying anyone at Z2H chose the winner. Just that the information we could glean from looking at standings and announcements was confusing to say the least!
17:10 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
Oh hey - don't worry about it: we've got nice thick skins. ;-) Seriously, this confusion is - as our tech lead puts it - "not a shining moment". We're working to sort it out now, but it looks like the display was working in a slightly bizarre fashion. The data, however, is good. Once we get to the bottom, we'll post an update! - CZ
17:55 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
Damn computer sentience... Andrew, has the editor's dashboard started e-mailing you instructions yet? Some of the others have gotten notes.
18:03 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
Thanks Andrew, except I'm HAL in this case, and if I remember correctly I don't have a happy ending. :-) Anyways, here's a rough overview of what happened. This is probably more detail than most of you care to know about how our voting system internals work, but for the sake of transparency I'll try to explain how the charts went wrong. First of all, the voting system itself worked fine. It recorded the votes properly, and there was no problem in there. Dreamcatcher was indeed in the lead until 1 hour before the end of the week, with North Wind close on its heels, and during the last hour of voting, North Wind received one additional vote, which pushed its score just over Dreamcatcher's, allowing it to land in 1st place for the crucial last chart update that determined the winner. So this all went correctly and as planned. The problem was in the chart component that displays the rankings and results. We have an automated script that runs every hour and updates the chart. As the CCN followers can recall, the hourly "where am I on the chart?" ritual was a result of this. The same script was used for APTN. Now once a winner is selected on the designated week day, the system moves a week counter forward (in this case to week 4) so that future votes count for the next iteration, or at the end of a contest, stop counting. This counter bump happened for the update script and for the voting, but somehow the chart script ignored it and continued thinking it was week 3. Since North Wind had won, all the votes for it stopped being counted, and Dreamcatcher got pushed into 1st place mistakenly. That's why it was showing up in gold winner 1st place this morning on the chart, instead of North Wind. Phew! So there you go. I hope that sort of makes sense. I'll spare you the "how it happened" part of the bug, but that's the "why it happened"... Sebzilla
18:12 Sat Jun 28th, 2008
Lol-No worries. This contest was fun and in truth, just the writing and having people read some of my story was very, very cool. So...my big congrats to Beth A Dillon and a warm thank you to the Z2H crew for letting me a part of this. Good luck on your project! :)
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Shiba_Naganori
16:39 Fri Jun 27th, 2008
That's bizarre, I hope it's either miscommunication, or a programming error, otherwise there will be some huge problems with Zeros 2 Heroes towards them picking the winners of their choosing, rather than what the people want.