SteemFest³ and the Meet the Steemians Contest are over. Guess you are all looking forward to the results of the contest. Here is finally some news about it.
Why did you wait so long?
As mentioned in our previous post, this was our first experience of organizing a contest which involved both an external application (the SteemFest app) and the SteemitBoard infrastructure.
Unfortunately, a number of technical and human issues arose during the course of the contest which made it more difficult for us to determine the number of meetings made by the participants and therefore their ranking.
1. People who do not identify themselves correctly
We had to identify the holder of the scanning device. It was clearly stated in SteemitBoard’s announcement:
Register yourself in the app by scanning your own QR code or entering your Steem username manually.
However, it turns out that several participants did not perform this operation and first scanned the QR code of the person they met before scanning/entering their own code/name.
Unfortunately, the screen displayed before the first scan (i.e. the registration of device holder name) was a bit too similar to subsequent scan screens and leaded to this errors.
2. People who forgot to re-identify themselves after reinstalling the SteemFest app.
Many SteemFest attendees started to scan each others before the MSC contest was officially announced and started.
At the opening speech of SteemFest, we advised users to reinstall the SteemFest app if they wanted to reset their scan list in the app. Some did, but forgot to re-identify themselves on their devices, leading SteemitBoard to think they were someone else after their next scan.
Others may have taken advantage of the reinstallation advice to change their devices.
3. Contestant not attending SteemFest
We had several “external” participants, not attending SteemFest, who interfered with the contest thanks to the ability to manually enter the name of a person in the SteemFest app instead of scanning his QR code.
Additionally, we had some other minor use case we did not expected but we won’t enumerate them here to avoid making this post TL;DR
Titanic work done
Out of 266 of the contestants, 73 were affected by the above mentioned problems, which means that we were had to double check who really did a scan for more than 1/4 of the participants.
In short, to use a typical expression from here, “C’était un peu le bazar” ("It was a bit of a mess")
As mentioned in our previous post, we wanted to be as fair as possible and had to check and reprocess every scan made between participants (9912 scans within the 4 days during which the contest lasted).
After making contact with our sponsors, and thanks to their trust and moral support, we embarked on a painstaking process of analysis and verification.
At the end of this work, we finally identified:
- 5272 valid scans
- 2065 mutual meetings made by 213 SteemFest³ attendees!
Contest data publicly available
The result of this work is now available to all in public speadsheet
Here a quick description of the spreadsheet content:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| name | The name of the participant making the scan |
| scan | The name of the participant being scanned |
| TS1 | Timestamp of the scan |
| Rname | If there was as reserse scan, the name of the participant making the scan. Empty if the initial scanned participant never made a back scan |
| Rscan | If there was as reserse scan, the name of the participant being scanned. Empty if the initial scanned participant never made a back scan |
| TS2 | Timestamp of the reverse scan, if any |
| Diff (sec) | Difference in seconds between the 2 scans |
| Diff (min) | Difference in minutes between the 2 scans |
Be ready for the final result
The Contest Ranking page has been updated with the result obtained from our validation work.
There are several changes in the rankings, especially because the initial ranking page did not always take into account the 2 minute rule for mutual meetings. This has been fixed.
The next step will be to unveil the names of the special attendees
Remember that among the participants of SteemFest³, some of them were “special attendees” and will bring you some bonus points (up to 115) if you met them!
There are:
| Attendee(s) | Meeting value |
|---|---|
| 1 gold | 15 MSC points |
| 5 silver | 10 MSC points |
| 10 bronze | 5 MSC points |
A list of all the participants with their random assigned ID has been published here.
We will now ask
We will then assign the bonus point to every participants if they met those special attendees.
This is likely to further change the ranking!
Stay tuned for the final results!
Thank you again to our awesome sponsors!
