New site… voting and views

posted by ryan on February 19th, 2007

So we just launched a brand new site called Project Breakout . We are starting with a pre-contest to find a video to use for promoting the site. On March 2nd the first main contest runs to find the next big sketch comedy star with Sketchfest NYC. This is our first production site using Videoegg for video and Amazon S3 for all other media, this means our server is just serving up HTML and all the heavy lifting is being handled by Videoegg and Amazon. It’s also our first site with Slingshot hosting; they have been more than fantastic and if you have a serious rails app to deploy call them. There are two very cool things Hampton came up with for Breakout that I wanted to share:

Voting has always been an issue, how so you keep the doors open (not requiring signup) but keep the contest fair? We thought we would try setting a timer on the vote button both on the client and server side using their IP address. Then the user gets a visual countdown to when they can vote next. This means you can stay on the page and keep watching while voting every 30sec.

Also using that same IP address we changed ’44 views’ to ’44 views by 12 people’. So now when one user keeps refreshing a page over and over to get higher views everyone can see they did it. Why waste time trying to prevent that activity when you can just expose it.