Problem
Contest moderation becomes difficult because entries contain spam, duplicates, or unrelated promotion.
Solution
Root Cause / Diagnostic:
Public contest threads attract bot farms, duplicate accounts, and unsolicited self-promoters who overwhelm human moderators and drown out legitimate participants.
Actionable Fix:
1. Deploy Account Age & Verification Gates: Require contest participants to submit entries via Google Workspace forms requiring authenticated Google accounts or phone-verified Discord accounts.
2. Automate Duplicate Detection via Scripting: Use Google Sheets formulas or Python scripts to screen entry databases for duplicate email addresses, IPs, or identical text strings.
3. Establish a Disqualification Blacklist: Automatically disqualify accounts submitting repetitive spam or unapproved promotional links without debate.
Pro Tip:
Gating contest entries behind authenticated forms eliminates 99% of bot submissions and frees your team to focus on evaluating legitimate creative entries.
Public contest threads attract bot farms, duplicate accounts, and unsolicited self-promoters who overwhelm human moderators and drown out legitimate participants.
Actionable Fix:
1. Deploy Account Age & Verification Gates: Require contest participants to submit entries via Google Workspace forms requiring authenticated Google accounts or phone-verified Discord accounts.
2. Automate Duplicate Detection via Scripting: Use Google Sheets formulas or Python scripts to screen entry databases for duplicate email addresses, IPs, or identical text strings.
3. Establish a Disqualification Blacklist: Automatically disqualify accounts submitting repetitive spam or unapproved promotional links without debate.
Pro Tip:
Gating contest entries behind authenticated forms eliminates 99% of bot submissions and frees your team to focus on evaluating legitimate creative entries.