First of all, I’d like to publicly and clearly and unequivocally thank Troy for all of his hard work and creativity.  He’s a big part of the success of namethis and we here at HQ appreciate him immensely.  He’s gotten a lot of guff in the community and I think a lot of it is unfair.  He has never won in anything resembling a suspicious matter.  He doesn’t invest his huge bounty of watts unfairly.  But most of all, he comes up with lots of great names.

Moving on, some info about the “Troy rule” or blind submissions.  In the 12 projects since blind submissions were implemented, Troy’s placed in 11 of them, with multiple placings in 3 and one first place win.  In the 12 projects previous to blind submissions, Troy placed in 11 of them, with multiple placings in 10, and 6 first place wins.  This is all very unscientific because I haven’t compared his rate of naming in each of those time periods, nor the rest of the communities, etc.  I haven’t looked at investment.  I simply looked at winners.

It’s a small sample set, so we can’t read too much into it, but I’m not sure there’s been a huge difference.  There’s been less multiple placings since blind submissions were implemented, whatever that might mean.  Hopefully this piece of evidence is yet another supporting piece of statistics which show that, in fact, the algorithm is doing it’s job and is not being gamed.

I know the easiest reaction is to assume that things are terribly unfair, but oftentimes, that’s just not the case.  I’ve tried to be as helpful and transparent as I can in answering questions on competitions and responding to concerns about methodology.  Kluster loves and appreciates all the feedback from this wonderful community.  We know this is a two way street and the whole premise of crowd sourcing is founded on the fact that we have a totally kick ass crowd — and we do!  Keep in mind that we’re all in this together, to produce great results, to have a fun time, to share the money you’ve earned by your brainpower, creativity, influence and dedication.  Keep the great feedback coming pertaining to what we can do to improve things.  I’m sure our oldest (in terms of Kluster participation) community members will agree that we’ve been really responsive to suggestions in shaping future features.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to see what the effect of blind submissions is and evaluate it as we roll out some new features.

Carry on … unicorns …