We have had a large number of correct answers (17 in the last 2 games) coming from non-verifiable e-mail addresses. These answers appear to be coming to us via anonymizing services such as TOR and/or VPNs, and judging from the structure of the answers and the fact that a large number of them seem to be from people with famous names, we strongly suspect they are coming from the same person or small group of persons. Why they are doing this is beyond us — there doesn’t appear to be any financial gain to be had from this, it just appears to be someone having their idea of “fun”.
This is a problem because we have had so many suspect answers that it is diluting the hard work that you wonderful people put in.
In an effort to combat this, we are instituting a slight rule change effective immediately. This change may or may not make a difference, but we feel we owe it to our regular players to at least try to combat this stuff.
So, here we go:
- For a player to be recognized in the reveal, leaderboard or past winners page, they will need to provide a verifiable e-mail address and respond to a verification e-mail following their first contest entry following this post with the following exception:
- Anyone who has played prior to Contest #630 and is in our database of players prior to Contest #630 will be considered to be verified already.