Post by leafo in Is there a way to tell whether a person opened many fictive accounts to increase his game rank?

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We can take administrative action against accounts if there is fraudulent activity going on, but we can not reveal private details about accounts like email addresses and ip addresses. In the future I recommend not using something for your class that enables students to cheat so easily. A good alternative could be hosting a game jam just for your students, and only allowing the people who submitted to rate the entries to prevent cheating.

I can tell you that we did just end up suspending a lot of accounts associated with those pages.

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erelsgl3 years ago(+1)

Thanks. It's been a hard semester, we could not have exams on campus due to COVID and had to find creative ways to encourage students to work. I did not think they will abuse it this way.

Question: when an account is suspended, are the ranks given by this account to specific games removed from the rank-count of the games?

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leafoAdmin3 years ago(+1)

The displayed rating on the project pages will now reflect any accounts that were suspended, but we can’t 100% detect all cheating, so I still believe that this metric for rewarding someone is not the best idea. We have a similar issue with people who host jams and have the voting set to public. It’s just too easy for people with more resources to completely push out anyone else.

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erelsgl3 years ago

Thanks a lot. Did you also check this page? https://aripash.itch.io/five-balloons

I totally agree with you that this was not a good idea for grading. I was too naive.

Another question: Is there a way to see how the number of ranks of a game changes over time?

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leafoAdmin3 years ago (4 edits) (+1)

It looks like more fraudulent accounts are being created. At this point I honestly recommend you tell your students that you can not provide any incentive or bonus for ratings, since they’re going to keep cheating.

If we keep seeing fraudulent activity that is negatively impacting the platform then we may have to take more strict administrative action on the accounts. I’m seeing hundreds of fake accounts being created a this point.

Thanks

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erelsgl3 years ago

The contest in my class ended at Thursday, 13/08 16:30 GMT. My students probably created accounts at the hours before the deadline in order to boost their grades. But any accounts created after the deadline are probably not related to my students, since they do not gain anything at this point,

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leafoAdmin3 years ago (3 edits) (+2)

I just want to add: Yest we can detect the people who are cheating in a very obvious way and remove those votes. But it’s hard to detect with confidence for smaller scale cheating. You will have people who might try to create one or two additional accounts to give themselves a little boost, which is unfair for those who don’t believe in cheating.

Additionally, rating systems only work at scale: when you have thousands of independent data-points. That will help eliminate any noise and give you a high confidence that the average rating represents the project. In your case, there’s probably a small chance that the projects for your class are going to be receiving a large number of independent ratings. The number of independent people seeking out school projects on our platform is not high. So you’ve effectively told your students to go reach out to their network of friends & family to get them to vote for them. You’re rewarding the students resources, not their work.

This is a completely unfair way to handle a school bonus, so I strongly recommend you find another way to handle it.

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