Fake Contest 2024

[RCPeterGabriel]

My story The Mrs. Santa Clause scored 4.85 but they declared a story with 4.71 as the winner. I followed all the rules. Why was I disqualified.

 

[StillStunned]

Bear in mind that the scores that are visible to readers tend to lag behind the actual scores (as visible to the writer). After the various sweeps, the actual scores are most likely very different to what the public sees.

Not only that, as soon as the winning stories are announced, they get bombed with multiple 1* ratings. Why? No-one knows. Jealousy, pettiness, just general trolling. But it always happens. Even stories that didn't place get bombed if people feel the scores are too high.

There's a lot of story bombing on this site, not just in connection with the contests. If you're lucky enough to make it into a category Hall of Fame, you'll receive the same treatment. It even happens with the "Popular today", "Popular last 7 days" and "Popular last 30 days" lists.

 

[Bazzle]

Also...how many votes did you get?

 

[ElectricBlue]

My story The Mrs. Santa Clause scored 4.85 but they declared a story with 4.71 as the winner. I followed all the rules. Why was I disqualified.

You weren't disqualified. Scores don't get locked when the contest is over, they're changing all the time. The winner is declared at a fixed point in time, but ten minutes later, the scores might have changed.

 

[lovecraft68]

My story The Mrs. Santa Clause scored 4.85 but they declared a story with 4.71 as the winner. I followed all the rules. Why was I disqualified.

I just saw this because I don't pop into this sub forum often.

Two things come to mind and one leads to another.

I'll just be the one to tell you the truth. You were screwed in the sweep and probably saw no bump or even a drop. Happens every contest and has been happening since the start of them

What also happens is when the readers-or other authors-see an obvious screw job, they tend to bomb the crap out of that story.

Over time the rule of thumb is every winner will generally drop a little bit from some spite bombs, but if it stays close to its initial score, then people really didn't see anything fishy. When one gets hammered the way your example does then people are seeing it as my first point.

Way back in 2012 I ended up being on the wrong end of one of the more epic screw jobs and the story that somehow supplanted mine was all the down to under 4.6 within a couple of days.

When the 'people speak' to that degree, it says something.