(Note: As always, recollections and opinions are from Gary only and are based on how I was feeling about things *at the time*, they are intended as historical perspective. DEFINITELY will need to put that on Season 6 posts!!!)
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You can't know why Season 5 happened without knowing Season 4. I've said that before, but for those who might not have seen previous Sidebars, allow me to recap:
Jacques and Bren. One came in with the "OMG, I want to help so much!!!" that became a "Why won't you let me help???" and eventually him going off the rails, starting his own version of Idol with the idea of replacing us.
The other came in OK, then got really entitled and convinced that she was the only one who could possibly be right, who created her own version. First as a joke (Ha! Ha!) and then for real when it became clear she wasn't getting her way.
These resulted in let's just call it "a whole lot of badness" and move forward.
One of my big takeaways - and again - this is MY takeaway, maybe you would have reacted differently to people stealing your idea and actively trying to recruit others to leave Idol. "Live and let live!!" "Room for everyone to take what you created and call it their own!!"
My perceptive going into the last part of Season 4, that carried into Season 5 is that I had made a mistake being as open as I had been. People took it as weakness. They took being open to hearing suggestions as "He doesn't know what he's doing!" and did their best to take advantage of that.
So going into Season 5, I was on the lookout for potential new versions of those two. I didn't want to stop anyone from redefining how they played the game, push boundaries but I also wanted to make sure the core of Idol was respected. That danger was
very much in the front of my mind at all times. (I just want to point out here that I was correct. There would be people who pushed boundaries to the very edge as well as some who thought that using what I'd built as a springboard to start their own versions were completely OK. I'll say at least those versions never outright said they were willing to "destroy Idol". so that was nice. But - for me - it's kind of like being invited to watch a show on a television they stole from your house! At the very least, I've *never* seen it as a "compliment" like some have advocated. But I seriously digress, because there is a serious question/allegation on the table. But I want to set the stage on where my head was. Anything that was attempting to break the wheel was bad.
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Also worth noting, and I think I've already mentioned this - that I had been approached by Livejournal admins with an offer to bring LJ Idol inhouse as an official thing. They basically wanted us to be their prompt generator to help engagement. That had been a couple years earlier than this, I think it was Season 3. I turned them down because I didn't want to give up control over Idol. They started their own prompt based "Writers Block" soon after that. I'm sure it had been in the works for a while. A few years later, when they were trying to revive it, they reached out to me *again*, this time not to absorb Idol but to see if I would run that *in addition*. I'm sure they reached out to other people as well. But none of those people are writing this. Again, I didn't want to do anything other than Idol. I would receive other offers over the years, and maybe I'll mention some as we go, but those were the first. It fits in here though because in order to understand how things played out, you need to know that it didn't happen in a vacuum.
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Not really related, but kind of related is that Season 3 was the first season anyone officially "made a spreadsheet" to keep track of contestants. These were mostly internal and individualized. If there's one thing I learned over the years, it's that people just really love collecting data! Give them an excuse to do it, and they will!! Sometimes it's helpful. Sometimes annoying. Most of the time it just "is".
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Now we get to the question:
therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1227834.html(for some reason it's not letting me post the thread llnk directly. So I'll repost emo_snals original comment:
"
Not to open old wounds, and/but I suppose Season 5 is still to be discussed and......this reminds me of our Season 5 drama. I discovered how to post the poll directly into an entry on my own livejournal. Didn't give me an "unfair" advantage, just a way to more directly enable my own friends list to vote, which was certainly an advantage but not an unfair one -- it worked within the scope of LJ functionality and I had just been clever enough to figure out it could be done. However, when Stacey told you how I did it, you didn't tell everyone, you told the people who asked you. And they quietly posted the poll in friends-only entries, which I immediately detected because like a lunatic I was taking hourly poll data and analyzing it (and these specific people were suddenly have huge spikes in poll numbers without a public entry, that were different in scale than anything they'd done before), and this posting of the poll by people who you told about it was later confirmed.Consequently, to restore justice, I shared it with everyone.I'm sure you'll give your own side in the Season 5 sidebar, but to my sense of justice, giving the advantage to those who happened to ask the moderator was an injustice. Obviously I am still here, I like LJ Idol and value the efforts you've put in to maintaining it, but it has always been my hope that you will see that that was an injustice and not maintain an inclination to give advantageous secrets to those who happened to be in regular direct correspondence with you.Breaking edit! -- I just discovered I had posted at that time another FAQ about the issue which I only ever posted in the Stacey-only filter, essentially to get her feedback, and eventually decided I came across as more defensive than I needed to be, but because I'm sure this issue will be discussed in a future sidebar, I direct you to the never-before-seen recently-declassified FAQ "
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I'm going to admit to a couple things: (1) I didn't remember this
at all,until he linked it. But it's worth discussing, so thanks! Because although might be about a specific instance, but it hit me right where I was feeling the most vulnerable. Which is when you tend to see the biggest reactions from me and are areas that I'm going to take personally regardless of intent or lack of it.
(2) My first thought was "OMG!!! What did I do???? Did I really do that???' I didn't recall ever giving people an unfair advantage. But if I had, then yeah, I'd feel awful. After reading through a couple times and having other people read through to check my own bias, I still feel the same about it as I did then.
It's worth reading to get a sense of where we were at the time. Honestly though, I think if you read through the comments everything was pretty well addressed. I didn't, and don't, get the sense that he actually thought anything he did was "wrong" merely using the entire playing surface. It's hard to argue against that point.
I DO think you need information that I found in my email though for the context of where MY head was at during that time.
As I've mentioned in other Sidebars, spydielives served as my between seasons and emergency tech advisor. Kittenboo served as my assistant for awhile. The fact that I went to spydie with this - I can definitely see it. Kittenboo hearing about it, and thinking "I should ask Gary" and me confirming it, yeah, I can see that as well.
I've talked about the "cycle of Idol" and how important it is to the success: Writers come to Idol to sign up, then link back to their own LJs, write their entries, linked back to Idol, the poll goes out, etc... you get it. (hopefully) When it's working, there is a flow of readers coming in from YOUR LJ and checking out what other people are writing as well. Maybe not at first, but season after season I've seen it happen.
Another important component though is that I'm the only one who sees the votes. I've seen people say "I absolutely voted for you" and they had not and much like any other voting process, having a level of security to it is paramount.
MY PARANOIA, back in Season 4 was the dual "What if someone else can track the IPs and determine who is voting and when" *and* "Can someone break apart the poll, either as a whole or individual parts and make a clickable "vote for me" option where people *don't have to go to the central LJ Idol site and thus increase the chances of them being exposed to the work of other writers?" Essentially just mining for voters and making it really easy for them to just click a button and go on with their lives. (Taking a problem that was already annoying and giving it the potential to be game-ending)
When spydie WROTE THE CODE for our polling system (using LJ's as a template and building from there) I actually sent to a couple friends who do that sort of thing for a living to check that there wasn't anything in there that would allow HER to track voters! I trusted her, and continue to trust her, but that was too big of a deal for me to leave out there as a possibility!
Spoiler: the code was good.
I took the second question to her and we both took it to the Livejournal admins we both had been dealing with (she had her own connections, so we independently verified). It WAS NOT POSSIBLE for anyone to embed the poll in their own LJ and there was no way to break it apart as a one-stop "click here" option (just pulling out a link to just their entry)
Flash forward a year or so later and due to updates we found out in real time that you COULD embed it now!! It was apparently useful for other types of polls but VERY BAD for us.
As that above link/discussion was happening, I was actively working with Livejournal techs to disable that feature or somehow block it for our polls. It got worse when it was being discussed that anyone clicking his poll/sharing it WAS VISIBLE TO HIM. Not only was this breaking the cycle, it was monitoring voting in the name of "tracking the votes", because data is fun.
Idolers have always loved stats and data and I get that. But tracking voters??? Definitely something I wanted to stop in it's tracks, not post about in public to encourage it to keep happening.
So no. I did not post that code or information. If asked, I confirmed that it had happened. I believe I was only asked once. (I didn't see any other emails on it) Most people found out about it from that post that was linked above.
That discussion with LJ went back and forth for a while with them promising to restrict it again. I don't think they ever did. (One of the *many* times over the years that I worked closely with Livejournal. Sometimes it resulted in getting what we needed. Usually it didn't - and it definitely got worse with the sales/moving the servers) I did actively encourage people to *not* do it though. After that, I really don't recall it being much of an issue, although from time to time you do still get people who try to monitor voters. I try to discourage that as much as I can. In general though, people should use official links for everything and maybe read, make a list and then vote in one block so you aren't getting time stamped at a specific journal just before your vote is registered!
I hate putting that burden on the voter. But there's not much that can be done about individuals who love collecting data!
I'd say my biggest regret on how I handled that was NOT being explicit enough on how big of a risk i felt this was to Idol. But, in my world, especially at the time, telling someone with a gun "please don't shoot me in the face!" didn't really get the result I wanted. IF I had explained myself better and made a personal appeal, it may have had a different result. OR it may have ended with "Gary is out of control and trying to shut me down!" post instead! :D *shrug* I'll get my multiverse traveling machine and see how many times each of those plays out!
In thinking about it though I can definitely see how "if you have a question - go to Gary" might be seen as an unfair advantage for those people who bring their questions to Gary. Especially since, in this case, the LJ rumor mill was quickly spreading but hadn't spread all the way out yet. What I should have probably done was, after finding out from Livejournal that yes, this was now possible.... put the rule in place that GOING FORWARD it wasn't allowed. Which would have been impossible to enforce because people could then just do it in private. Hand everyone the gun and hope that mutual ensured destruction would be enough of a threat that no one would pull the trigger.
Doing that though, with where my head was at the time... we definitely wouldn't have gotten to Year 20. I doubt we would have gotten to Year 6. I wasn't interested in that sort of thing moving forward.
My takeaway was that I needed to pull back even further from my interactions with people because I was putting them at risk. A less personal approach was needed.
There's a lot more to talk about with Season 5, before skipping right to Season 7. ;) But I've potentially thrown a live grenade into the room as is, so I'll let those wait until next time!
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