Dear bloggers!Wow, voting rigging on a grammar blog contest?!?!? I had checked in a couple of time out of curiosity ... it's really about grammar blogs and not linguistics blogs, so it's not something that we have promoted here. But a scandal! Linguabloggers cared enough to cheat!
Yesterday, October 17, at 11.59 p.m. PST the contest for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 was supposed to end. The competition was intense; voters were doing their best to support their favorite blogs. The winners will be announced on Friday, October 21st. Unfortunately, we had to disqualify two blogs. But we would still like to have real winners, so we have extended the voting until Thursday, October 20th, 11.59 p.m. PST.
We will continue to monitor the voting process and hope the competition will be fair (each person can vote only once).
Contact us if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Grammar.net team
contest@grammar.net
It's all about grammar!
Somebody has to know the inside scoop. Dish please!
4 comments:
nooooo the diacritics aren't on there anymore! they were second before, and i actually think the winners are gone now too. i voted for the diacritics because i didn't see mr. verb on there, and then when i did i was so sad. but the diacritics is also great and that's really a shame what happened.
Thanks. I thought the Diacritics had disappeared too.
Like I said, we didn't push Mr. Verb and that's how we want it ... we're not an award-winning operation, just plain old linguists having fun.
My blog was one of those nominated for this "honor." I carefully read all the rules -- or rather I should say I looked for the rules. There are no rules. None. Nothing that says who can vote and how often one can vote. There is no scandal in the voting; although the email from GrammarNet implies there was cheating, I don't see how anyone can cheat when there are no rules or restrictions.
It was only when I received this email that I learned that GrammarNet had decided (retroactively) that a person could vote only once. Yet, there is no way for them to know who has voted more than once; and there is no way for a blogger to control the number of times a fan votes for their blog.
The only way GrammarNet could be sure that no blog received more than one vote from an individual would be to disqualify every blog that got more than 1 vote.
This has just been a mess for all contestants, who promoted GrammarNet, giving this website (of questionable credibility) free PR and marketing. I'm embarrassed that I asked my friends, family, colleagues, and readers around the world to vote in this competition.
This may have started out as a real competition, but the folks at GrammarNet did not know anything about conducting an Internet contest and owe an apology to all those who were duped into participating in a free viral marketing campaign for their site.
Well now, that's not the story I was expecting here ... I was hoping for international intrigue.
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