As promised, here's an update on the program. Eric, the rest of the BTG moderator team and I decided to send out an email to all of the most active members on BTG. We wanted to gently remind everyone of the rules of the competition, which include removal from the lists for posting too many short or redundant messages. I hope that this will help us see more of the good posts and less of the bad ones.
Here is the email that I sent out. As you will see, I even explicitly referenced this thread within the email. Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
---- Email to all most active Beat The GMAT members ----
Subject: Important message regarding Beat The GMAT's Giant GMAT Giveaway Program
Hi there,
I'm David, one of the administrators of Beat The GMAT. I'm sending this email out to all of our most active members on Beat The GMAT recently. My apologies for the form email, but I wanted to get an important message out about the Giant GMAT Giveaway promotion as quickly as possible.
Thank you very much for all your contributions to the community! One of the things that makes Beat The GMAT unique is that it features a ton of great community members who generously spend time to help one another learn and succeed in b-school admissions.
You may have noticed that we launched a program called the Giant GMAT Giveaway in late January. The purpose of this program was to reward our most active community members with cool prizes, as a show of thanks for all your contributions (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/giant-gmat-giveaway). Overall, the response that we've seen has been positive in that many members are posting lots of valuable posts on a daily basis. But I wanted to give you a heads up that some members have complained that there are more non-value added posts than they'd like (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/petition-to- ... 51708.html).
So I'd like to remind all of our top members about the rules for this giveaway (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/giant-gm ... ant_update), which emphasize the need to post valuable messages rather than just extremely short ones. I don't think that most of our top members have been posting too many non-value added posts. In fact, the Beat The GMAT moderator team has been following our members' posts closely since we launched the program, and we think that most of the posts are good.
In order to address our other members' concerns during the final two weeks of the Giveaway promotion, however, we're sending out this reminder that we are reviewing all top members' posts and will weed out people who appear to be abusing the system by our standards. Examples of abuse include: too many one-word responses, or tons of topics that consist of just copying and pasting old questions featured in the forums. We've already caught a couple of people attempting to manipulate the rules and removed them from the leaderboard. Here is an example (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/member76343.html).
Given all the effort that you all have put into posting in the Beat The GMAT community, we'd really hate to have to take action on any of our top members.
Now that this unpleasantness is out of the way, I'd like to thank you all again for being active contributors to Beat The GMAT. I look forward to following your stories and seeing you succeed in your MBA journey!
All the best,
David
