Do not believe your eyes

Not all competitions by name are as such. Most often these are marketing events with a notoriously famous ending. However, to participate in the crowd is not forbidden. However, many contestants who rely on something more than simple participation often protest against the “game without rules”. If the protest has a weighty basis, then in order not to discredit the whole event, the organizers make concessions. This happened with the Runet-2007 Award , which, under pressure from several sites of winners of last year’s competition, was forced to change the rules of the game.

It all began with last year's open letter to the participants of the “People's Ten” Runet 2006 Prize to the organizers of the contest . Initially, the organizers vividly responded to criticism. They promised to introduce technical means to combat “cheating” (a picture with a digital code, the need to confirm their choice by clicking on the link in the letter), to make the procedure of SMS voting more transparent and to remove from the list sites that contradict Russian legislation (mainly adult -thematics). “In fact, none of these promises were fulfilled,” representatives of the Orthodox web developers community stated in their explanation of the participation of Orthodox websites in Runet Award 2007 , which was signed by representatives of all four Orthodox websites that entered in the past year in the "top ten".

The first reaction to the refusal of last year’s winners to participate in the Award was followed by the websites of two antagonists: Habrahabr and the Web-planet . Moreover, in both cases, in the articles with clearly “yellow” headlines, a generalization was made to all Orthodox sites, a lot of overdocks and misinformation were allowed. However, the authors understood the meaning of the appeal correctly. The consequence was that the organizers of the award corrected the rules and declared it openly . Then several more articles followed: on Telnews.ru and two posts on the Web-planet ( ROCIT: “Representatives of Orthodox resources did not notice anything” and “ They told the Orthodox to advertise FireFox” ). In the last two materials there were even more delays and misinformation than in the previous ones. But the main thing was the result, about which the Orthodox web developers declared in the second press address , namely:
1) after the first appeal, the organizers canceled the sms-vote;
2) cleaned the list of contestants from adult sites (in other words, porn sites) and
3) put the first real protection of the vote against markups - the voter must solve some arithmetic example and enter the answer, otherwise the vote will not be accepted.
In the second message, the Orthodox web developers also summed up their demarche: “We do not regret the decision made and are pleased that not without our participation in organizing the main Internet contest of Runet, positive trends began to be observed. Let us hope that next year there will be more positive changes and the competition will finally start to get rid of the image of the “marginal event” that has stuck to it. We wish all projects, despite the shortcomings in the organization of voting, who have decided to participate in the competition this year, fair competition and fair judging. Our readers who have decided to participate in the competition are encouraged to cast their votes for community projects Miloserdie.Ru, Sirotinka.Ru, Mozilla-Russia.org, Gramota.ru, Deafworld.ru and other similar sites. ”
One of the participants of the very first last year's address to the Award organizers, a representative of the Mozilla Russia website , Alexei Gubanov, told TelNews that the authors of the open letter showed “a position worthy of respect,” but does not plan to support Orthodox websites in the matter of a boycott of the people's vote. Alexey Gubanov also made some assumptions regarding the outcome of the vote: “I don’t think there will be a site on Runet whose popularity can be compared to bash.org.ru. Of course, this is a real popular leader, and is worthy of victory, whatever the attitude towards the award itself. If, with such a bright leader, any gaming site wins the vote, well, we will once again see what this prize is worth. ”
Source: Monitoringkonkursa.ru