#WeMadeAMistake
I made a mistake, mishandled a simple situation that could have been done better. I guess I got carried away with the Found saga and went on to bash the wrong things regarding Asia’s Top 50 Apps voting system. No excuses. I made a mistake.
The Top 50 Apps voting system hacks left a big impression on the community, most of it being how we mishandled the whole thing from the start and let it get out of hand. And we acknowledge it. Here’s what happened:
- One of the nominated app’s developer, Erwan, found a hack in in the voting plug-in javascript
- He made efforts to contact us via Twitter and also email
- We did not respond to his alert and also failed to acknowledge the problem in a blog post.
What we should have done:
- We should have worked with the community to solve the issue by getting in touch with Erwan or asking the developer community for help.
- We should have alerted people of the problems so that they are aware of it.
- We should have let people know we were working on fixing the hack
That said, what is done is done for us. We acknowledge a number of the community members have already lost faith in the legitimacy of the awards. The only way we can regain trust and legitimacy for ourselves and the award is by taking the appropriate steps to make sure that there will be a fair outcome. Here’s what we are doing, and do give us your feedback on how we can do it better if you have one. We need your support
- we have temporarily shut down the voting so that we can clean up the data
- we are going to integrate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connect so that the voting system is more secured
- we are going to look at all the previous votes and remove the illegitimate votes. That way, legitimate votes wont be put at a disadvantage
- we are open to more feedback from community on how to make it better
Community building is all about communication and trust. We failed because we didn’t communicate what we were doing about the problem effectively. We failed because we, and the voting contest, lost your trust. We slipped up. It’s a good lesson for us and we are learning.
We want to make things right, and we hope that the community will help. The end goal is to bring the ecosystem forward. We may have taken a few steps backwards yesterday but we hope that it will not stop us from taking many more steps forward tomorrow. For those who have supported us, we are sorry for letting you down and thank you for your support.
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