Daily Contest Rules
- Members can vote once each hour.
- As of Jun 16, 2013, poets can not vote for themselves even though the system lets you.
- The winning poem is displayed on www.poetrypoem.com's homepage. This is the only prize.
- All poems added to the site are eligible. Poems deleted from the site may be deleted from the contest and from the contest history.
- Poets that change a poem title or poem also change the poem that was voted on in the contest.
- Sometime nearly every day voting restarts and the previous day's votes are erased.
- The contest is free to members. Poets don’t pay to enter.
The contest is completely free.
Note:
We once asked for $1 a vote to stop abuse by self-appointed judges that were clever enough to circumvent the free contest system, but members did not want to pay $1 to vote. We provide the following history of the contest's evolution in hopes all will realize the huge amount of work done to keep the contest free. We hated adding the $1 fee because we knew most readers would not vote, but we really had no choice.
At great cost, the crew continuously added measures to prevent the self-appointed judges from abusing the free contest, but the determination of the self-appointed judges was great.
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We blocked certain addresses (It took about 4 hours work from the crew to do this) – The self-appointed judges changed their addresses.
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We blocked certain users (It took about 8 hours of work overall) – The self-appointed judges changed their userIDs.
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We implemented cookies to verify votes (It took the crew 3 full days to develop, test and implement) – They circumvented the cookie checker.
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We implemented email verification (It took us about 4 days to develop, test and implement) – They spammed other readers with the email voting system that caused AOL and HOTMAIL to block most email from our Voting System (It took us 1 day to troubleshoot and 2 days to develop a new email notification system to AOL and HOTMAIL users).
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We blocked email addresses that could vote (This took us about 4 hours) – The self-appointed judges changed their email addresses.
On October 16, 2006, We imposed a $1 fee per vote (It took us 30 minutes to activate and test) – From our perspective, the rule of PoetryPoem’s self appointed judges of the Poetry Contest ended, but members and readers did not use the contest.
- January 10, 2007: We upgraded the contest to allow for free votes.
- June 16, 2013: We changed the rules to indicate that poets can not vote for themselves.
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