Awards Article - Award Spammers -- a Pain in the...

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Richard Berends, Webmaster, Website Awards

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The article in this page is one in a series of articles intended to bring you the thoughts and expertise of webmasters who are the leading authorities in the field of awards. The author operates one of the best Award Sites in the world. Based on years of experience, this article offers you expert advice on the topic of awards. Armed with the valuable insights in this article, you will be better prepared to create an award winning website or a top award program.

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Award Spammers – a Pain in the…

by Tyron Montgomery, Webmaster
X-PLOSIVE web-design (award program closed)
15 October 1999

Before I get started, I wish to thank Don for inviting me to write an article for Website Awards. It might be boring to read the same thank-yous in front of these articles, again and again, but I think we can't say "thanks" often enough. Especially Website Awards and Focus Award Sites! have helped to make the culture of web-awards what it is, today, and are truly a great contribution to the Internet community.

While awards for music, films or art have had decades to develop and grow, web-awards are still quite young, and there is a lot to discuss. Therefore, I think Don's idea of having a series of articles is really great, and I'm happy to be part of it.

Previous Articles

Reading the articles of my predecessors, I realized one subject popping up everywhere: Award spammers, those nasty award hunters applying for each and every award with often quite terrible websites, ignoring the criteria, wasting our time. Some websites give tips on how to win awards and how to apply for awards correctly. In his article "It's Fun; But Get Serious," Jeff Clark sets out to make the reader "a better applicant," and Ron Wilson lets applicants know his "Seven Secrets to Winning Top Awards."

These approaches are all a good start, but will the spammers we are actually aiming at really take the time to read our words and take our advice? Some might, but most of them will probably just continue leaping to the application forms, ignoring everything else.

What can we do about this? Instead of complaining we should help ourselves. I've put together some ideas I have discussed recently with my judges, at X-PLOSIVE. I've also added some general comments on award programs because we, the award givers, also do make quite a few mistakes.

The Criteria

Many people ignore the criteria. I believe this problem is not always the result of the applicants' ignorant mentality. Some award criteria are simply too long. Try to keep your criteria short and point out the most important ones. If you feel your criteria are just right, here are some other solutions to think about...

	If your award is only for a specific type of websites, let's say art sites, include a field in your application form asking "Is your website about art?" You can be sure that an applicant, even if he skipped your criteria, will pay attention to your application form.

	Adding one or more fields with your main criteria (and yes/no buttons) to the actual application form will decrease the chance of spammers applying for your award. You can even install a Javascript sorting out applications that still contain answer buttons set to "no."

	Place your criteria on the same page as your application form. If you give applicants the choice to either read the criteria or to go to the application page directly many will not read the criteria, simply as a result of laziness. If you want to keep the criteria on a separate page think about installing a Javascript that adds a hidden input tag to your application form, telling you whether somebody read the criteria or not.

	Having the criteria on the same page as the application form, it's impossible to tell whether an applicant has read the criteria or not. But you can install a Javascript in combination with a hidden input tag, telling you how much time the applicant spent on that page.

	Instead of having an application form on your site you can also create a downloadable text file with your criteria, your e-mail address for submission and a form applicants can copy and paste into their application e-mail.

	Why? Well, some applicants simply don't read the criteria because being online costs money. This offline procedure will not only put off spammers right away, it will put less time pressure on your applicants, increasing the chance of them really paying attention to your criteria (only problem with this solution: Award Sites require an application form on your website for awards with high rating levels.)

	Now, this one's a little tricky, and I'm not a fan of it, but it can be a solution for high-traffic award websites: Pop-up windows, too many advertising banners, bad language and certain other elements, that would disqualify a website anyway, can be detected automatically, using a spider program. This program, running on your server and started immediately after an application, can sort out websites not meeting your basic criteria, reducing the amount of spam applications you might receive.

Sending Answers to Spammers

I guess, many award spammers don't actually realize they're wasting our time. They jump from one website to the next, coming across similar criteria everywhere, and begin to ignore them altogether. We must tell them that they are misbehaving, otherwise they won't know. Have some pre-written e-mails ready to send as an answer to spammers. It will just take you 20 seconds to hit the answer-button and flush in the text, but you will help all of us by doing this, on the long run.

If you have one of the Javascripts installed I mentioned above you could actually make it send out e-mails automatically, without wasting your own time, if an applicant didn't read your criteria or only spent 30 seconds on your page.

Don't display a message while he or she is still on your site. That would make it too easy for spammers. Let them apply, send an e-mail later and force them to go through the whole procedure again. Whoever is serious will think about it and maybe behave differently, next time. To some of you this might sound a little too radical. But my opinion is: If someone wastes my time I might as well waste his.

Giving out Awards

Here are a few comments I would like you, dear award giving friends and colleagues, to think about. My thoughts might not be new to the old hands amongst you. But I come across quite a few young award programs that could do with some advice.

	Image Size: In your criteria, most of you ask for fast loading websites. How come, at the same time, you send out award images up to 50kB in size?? Then, in the criteria or the "congratulations" e-mail, you even say the award image may not be altered.

	Yeah, congratulations to you for making other people's websites slow! I would consider 10kB to be an acceptable size. If you feel your award image should be larger, think about offering an alternative, like we do at X-PLOSIVE. Our animated award has 16kB, but we always send out two smaller non-animated versions as well with 9kB and 5kB.

	Stealing Awards: Many of you have encountered this problem. Some people just steal your award image from a winner's website and place it on their own. Most surfers don't consider awards to be important enough to check your winners list and just believe a website displaying your award did win it. This can easily damage your reputation as a high profile award site. Only display a sample award, on your website. Customize your award by placing the winner's name on the award image. This will also make the experience of winning your award something more special for the winner.

	Guest books: I never understood the necessity to sign the guest book prior to an award application. If you want some nice comments on your site then sit down and create something special, instead of trading accolades for awards.

	Award Page and Link Requirement: Of course it's nice to have your award image linked back to your site, but is it your aim to place links on other websites or to acknowledge the hard work of some web designers? As Gazoo already said: "A butt kicking page is a butt kicking page", no matter whether your award is on it or not.

	The only thing I can understand is the anger if you've spent time on creating a customized award, which is then not displayed by the winner. But is that a reason not to place the winner in your list? At X-PLOSIVE, we simply don't send award images to sites without award galleries, but still they are notified and placed in our winners list. If they ever set up an award gallery we'll be happy to send them a customized award image, later.

	Jury comments: Some juries send comments about the winner's site along with the award image. I like that. It would be nice if more of you would do so. But give your comments some thought. Some awards come with standard comments you will then find on every one of the winner sites, some come with lots of Greats and Cools but don't actually say anything and some overdo it by sending a sermon filling an entire page.

	An award comment should give the winner energy to continue with his great work, but it should also show him which parts of his site might need some enhancement. Especially, in case you are giving out gold, silver and bronze, tell a silver or bronze winner why he didn't win gold. That will be more help than "Keep up the great work, dude!"

	Mailing Lists: If I want to be in your mailing list I will tell you. We all know many websites give out awards to increase traffic on their site, place links all over the web and send advertising along with their e-mails to the winners. We'll probably have to live with that, now and in the future. But being honoured by having my e-mail address added to some exclusive mailing list (although I ticked the no-button on the application form) and being spammed with advertising, ever after, is over the limit. In my eyes, these kind of awards should be banned from Website Awards, Focus Award Sites! and similar link lists.

	Application Form: If possible use a CGI-script to generate the application e-mail that will be sent to you. Many award websites use "mailto" in their form tag, thereby excluding every applicant who hasn't set up the e-mail program of his browser properly. For example, many AOL users only send e-mails through AOL, but surf the web on an external browser. Almost every webspace provider offers these scripts, today, and they're not that difficult to use.

	Design: You don't need to be a film maker to know what a good film is, and you might even be able to tell apart whether it was the acting, the light or something else that made a movie special. But still I think your website should reflect your own award standards in design and content, to a certain degree.

	You can't set out to award only the best websites if your website is full of blinking GIFs, blinding backgrounds and misspelled words and if you offer an award image too embarrassing to display. If your website isn't well done good web designers will never apply for your award, and you will only ever get to see second class work.

	Nominee Icons: Some of you ask applicants to place a nominee icon on their pages with a link back to your site, while waiting for your jury's decision. Although I understand you might want a favour in return for spending your time on reviewing websites, I don't really like the way this procedure is handled, in most cases. If you ask your applicants to display a nominee icon, at least be fair and notify the ones that didn't win so they needn't continue hoping and doing you a favour, after their application has long disappeared into the trash can of your desktop.

What I've said above might sound a little negative, here and there. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great award programs out there. But the majority of the web awards are given out by amateurs, who should take all the advice they can get.

The mass of awards we have on the web, today, makes it difficult for the average surfer to tell which awards are actually a high honour and which are just an easy to win decoration. Don's list of the World's Top Awards and Award Sites' rating system have helped to separate the wheat from the chaff. Now it's up to the wheat to help the chaff become wheat — or to help the wind blow away the chaff :-)

About the Author

Tyron Montgomery, webmaster of X-PLOSIVE web-design, is a film director and director of photography, mainly for animation, commercials, and promotionals. He also does visual effects for movies. His animated short film, "Quest," won more than 40 awards in 1996 and 1997, including the Academy Award in 1996. The X-PLOSIVE web-award program, in addition to a high profile award, offers plenty of information about the subject of awards. This area of the website will be expanded, step by step, as time permits.

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