On MakerWorld, we hold weekly Design Contests to inspire innovation and creativity among our users. We’ve been impressed by the increasing quantity and exceptional quality of submissions each week. However, as our contests gain more attention, we’ve noticed a concerning trend. Some users are clearly uploading models unrelated to the contest theme intentionally to gain visibility, which is unfair to legitimate contestants and disruptive to users seeking theme-relevant models. To address this, we are implementing penalties to prevent such behavior.
For each detected irrelevant model uploaded to the contest page, we will deduct 50 points from the user’s account.
If a single user violates this rule up to 3 times in total, this user will be banned from entering future contests.
The punishment is straightforward, aiming to eliminate irrelevant models from our contest pages. Additionally, we would like to share ways for users to assist us in monitoring this issue.
Report the model and describe the issue clearly. Tell us which contest this model is participating in. Our team will assess each case meticulously to decide on appropriate actions.
You are always welcome to comment under this post with your suspected violator.
This should serve as a strong warning for individuals looking to violate the regulations of our contest, as we hope to offer our participants and creators a neat and organized contest setting.
This is amazing!! Looking forward to more updates with MakerWorld. We were skeptical at first even uploading a single model… We’ve steered a different path of simply creating dedicated models only available on MW.
This is a good idea but it needs to be clearly reflected in contest rules.
For example at the moment in the kit card competition nowere in the rules is mentioned:
that the upload needs to be a kit card [edit: it’s in the ToS]
what defines a kit card
that not uploading a kit card will be punished [edit: ToS just say ‘disqualification’]
When will this penalties start to take effect? Is this retroactive?
Is/will there be a way to ‘unjoin’ a contest?
It’s nice to see this determination in making the platform better, while listening to users.
There are lot of enthusiastic people who made their life mission reporting contraventions to the rules. Sometimes, these people are missing the mark, reporting valid designs.
I think the Makerworld staff will prevent those over-zealous users from causing problems. I’d venture to say they’ll error on the side of wanting to keep things up, so it’ll probably be the most obvious ones that get booted from the contest.
Although, an appeal process is certainly needed, as you asked about. .
There have been the totally unrelated ones in all previous contests, but there are also some that try to force a model to be related, such as many entries in the kit card contest (even some popular ones ) (hilarious, in some sense).
It would be good to edit the Contest Rules page to have this detail info so some cannot argue that the punishments are not officially in the rules. Right now it just says vaguely that repeated offenders will be DQ’d. While at it, also edit some sentences to reflect the recent new rule about requiring actual photos. There are two places on that page that still have the word ‘renderings’.
It’s interesting to think about the motivation of uploading irrelevant models to the contents. Apparently, they eager for more exposures and traffic. There are more spam activities, such as
Upload irrelevant models to 3D printer accessories category
(3D printer accessories category has the top entry point in the Bambu Handy app landing page)
Upload irrelevant models and mark it as the remix of a popular model
(there is a remix tab in the model page, remixing a popular model apparently can have higher exposure)
Apart from punishments, it would be good to think about guiding people to do suggested “growth-hack”, topics can cover
Landing picture optimization (how to make the landing picture looks professional, maybe some good landing picture examples others can follow. I also wondered if Makerworld can provide an easy-to-use edit tool for landing picture)
In-site search and keywords optimization, give exposures to search optimized models (the technical threshold for SEO/keyword optimization is relative low compared to artistic optimization)
Personal Content Recommendation (rolling out on web, hopefully it can also be available in Bambu Handy, I would be excited to always see new contents when I open the app, which will also give new models more exposure)
thank you
) (hilarious, in some sense).
