4 ms·

I couldn't find the info on the site but how do you decide when to release the funds to the developer? I've developed a similar site in the past but never publ

I couldn't find the info on the site but how do you decide when to release the funds to the developer? I've developed a similar site in the past but never publicly released it as there was a few flaws in the system that I couldn't work around. I've since moved on but I'm wondering how you managed to get around them. For my system you got votes based on the amount you contributed. This opened the site up to people pledging just enough to get 51% of the vote then accepting any solution even bad ones. The other way where the creator of the bounty gets the final say also opens up to people creating popular bounties then claiming them for themselves with no acceptable solution posed. Outside of automated solutions I suppose you could have staff review each claim manually but I decided against this idea as it just couldn't scale. Anyhow, curious to read your solutions to these problems.

drewcrawford 18y ago
Voting algorithms are hard. If people game Digg and Reddit, you just know they're going to be all over you when there's money involved. We've got some pretty good metrics that we're looking at. The obvious ones, like number of contributors, voting times, and so on. We also look at activity, and construct minimum spanning trees for various subsets of users as an automated "Someone should look at this" flag. Contribution times and rates are also something we look at. Probably the biggest single stopgap measure is decidedly low-tech: there's a short delay (a day or so) between project release and release of funds. If any real people at all are downloading the stuff they paid for and it doesn't work, hopefully they'll shoot an e-mail off to us and we'll take a look.
- sanswork 18y ago
  The last solution you mentioned was one I ended up implementing but I just wasn't happy enough with the rest of the solution to work out better fraud detection. One other suggestion for going forward might be to implement none software bounties as well. A large portion of my development was based on the idea of community bounties. Say Bountyville wants their park cleaned up so their kids can play they all chip into a bounty on your site. Receive proposals from companies then choose the best one to do the job. This would help you get more "normal" people involved in the site which might translate into these people discovering the software side of the site as well. The only difference you need for those are a two stage voting process where by users vote on proposals before the action and also on the result after. Anyhow, best of luck.

drewcrawford 18y ago

Voting algorithms are hard. If people game Digg and Reddit, you just know they're going to be all over you when there's money involved. We've got some pretty good metrics that we're looking at. The obvious ones, like number of contributors, voting times, and so on. We also look at activity, and construct minimum spanning trees for various subsets of users as an automated "Someone should look at this" flag. Contribution times and rates are also something we look at. Probably the biggest single stopgap measure is decidedly low-tech: there's a short delay (a day or so) between project release and release of funds. If any real people at all are downloading the stuff they paid for and it doesn't work, hopefully they'll shoot an e-mail off to us and we'll take a look.

sanswork 18y ago
The last solution you mentioned was one I ended up implementing but I just wasn't happy enough with the rest of the solution to work out better fraud detection. One other suggestion for going forward might be to implement none software bounties as well. A large portion of my development was based on the idea of community bounties. Say Bountyville wants their park cleaned up so their kids can play they all chip into a bounty on your site. Receive proposals from companies then choose the best one to do the job. This would help you get more "normal" people involved in the site which might translate into these people discovering the software side of the site as well. The only difference you need for those are a two stage voting process where by users vote on proposals before the action and also on the result after. Anyhow, best of luck.