Cointest Updates: Winners, prior rounds revised, rounds ending soon, recruiting new mods, introducing r/CointestOfficial, and other changes.

Greetings, r/CryptoCurrency! We are pleased to finally announce the winners of the most recent Cointest round for the Coin Inquiries category. We've been busy catching cheaters and revising the results from previous rounds, hence our reason for being late this time. We'll get into the details towards the end of this post.

As a reminder: the r/CryptoCurrency Cointest is an official, ongoing competition for crowdsourcing the best arguments in support of or against crypto topics by awarding Moon prizes to the winning contestants. The end goal is to provide r/CC readers with a balanced source of quality information for their cryptocurrency research.

Winners – Coin Inquiries

The Coin Inquiries round ended on October 31^st and a total of 11000 moons will be distributed to the winners listed below:

Best Analysis award goes to /u/MrMoustacheMan for Monero pros! You can find the argument here.

Prior Rounds Revised

Unfortunately, we found several cases of plagiarism and had to remove some contestants from not only this round, but also the previous Top 10 and General Concepts rounds. We'll update the archive in the near future. To help prevent future plagiarism, we created a bounty system. See the changes section below for more details.

New Round

The new Coin Inquiries round has been live for three weeks. However, rule 3 has been removed. Therefore, arguments can no longer be copied, even if the conditions for rule 3 are met. This change will of into effect starting in the current round for Coin Inquiries.

Recruiting

The Cointest team is looking to recruit more moderators. If you are interested in joining the team, read this post and submit an application.

Furthermore, we are looking for a few more bot devs and may want to trial at least three for one month. Bot devs will be given a small share of the r/CC mod distribution. For the first month of evaluation, they’ll receive 1k moons each. If approved for tier 2, they’ll receive 3-5k moons a month.

Changes

• As stated above, rule 3 was removed. Arguments can no longer be copied.

• r/CointestOfficial has been created. It will act as a central hub of the contest from now on. All new topic-threads will be submitted there instead of r/CC so contestants can subscribe and see the bigger picture for the contest as a whole. The rules and guidelines are visible in the sidebar and megathreads will be pinned to help out with various aspects of the project. All the wiki pages have moved there as well.

  Since everything is moving to r/CointestOfficial, the title of administrator was changed to moderator. This should help prevent any confusion with the Reddit admin title.

• A new provision has been added to the Cointest policy allowing for bounty prizes. These bounty prizes will be awarded for accurately reporting cases where contestants have plagiarized, used sock puppets, or included incorrect facts in their arguments. The time window for submitting bounty reports for a round will be in between mid-month updates like this post. In other words, to submit a bounty report for the previous Coin Inquiries round, you must submit your report in the Bounty Megathread in r/CointestOfficial in between now and December 14th next month. The moons for bounty prizes will come out of the prize pot for the top three winners per topic thread. Therefore, the contestants who get selected as the winners after judging is over, will have to wait another month before receiving their moon prizes. This effectively increase the time range of every round to 4 ½ months. The obvious intention is to deter contestants from violating the rules.

  As stated above, the Cointest team had to do a lot of work revising the archive in order to accurately reflect who the true winners were. Several cases of plagiarism were discovered among the top winners of previous rounds. We hope announcing bounty prizes will be enough to deter this behavior.

• A new category called Waiting List has been created. This category will be for topics which haven’t been covered in the Cointest yet. It will act as a testing ground to help find topics for future rounds in the Coin Inquiries and General Concepts rounds. There will be no rounds or formal judging in this category. All topic threads will be live indefinitely unless selected for a round. To submit a topic in this category, follow the instructions in the r/CointestOfficial sidebar.

• A new rule has been added to give clearer guidance on what counts as plagiarism and the consequences for doing it.

• Last but not least, we had to remove a mod from the team for disciplinary reasons. This mod was u/108record. We discovered he had plagiarized numerous arguments in several prior rounds. It was also discovered he infiltrated the team with a second account called elrond4 and was using it as a sock puppet. Both these accounts were giving favorable judging scores to each other in r/CointestAdmin. Given these egregious violations of r/CC rules and our standards, we removed 108record and elrond4 from the team and banned them from the Cointest. It wasn’t easy to do this since this mod was indispensable to the team for developing and updating our bot, hence the reason we’re open to recruiting new bot devs at this time.

  To help prevent this from happening again, a tier system has been implemented for segmenting the Cointest mod team. See the policy page for more details.

Reminders

• The registry collects all topics open for participation in one place. See the column for General Concepts to find topics ending soon.

• The archive lists out all current and closed topics. Users can find prior threads on a topic to help refine their arguments (or to help with DYOR).

• The policy section outlines Cointest rules and guidelines among other aspects of the project.

Thank you for your attention and see you at r/CointestOfficial!