Of Trolls, Robots And New Auction Rules
AnimalCare 
Aug 17, 2014 
AnimalCare, NGOs 
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We’ve always been so proud of the fact that though the AnimalCare community is small, our communication in this blog has always been based on principles of responsibility, ethics, goodwill, honesty and respect.
We know there are many online auctions out there and there are many prank-bidders, those who simply put in a bid with no intention of paying up or worse, those who simply hike up the bid for fun, which is a most unethical thing to do. And we’ve always been so proud of the fact that AnimalCare does not have such pranksters.
But being a public forum, we cannot control who comes for our auctions, so for the first time after more than 70 auctions, we have a bidder in the last auction who won the bid, but had given a fake email address which was not reachable at all. Gmail bounced it back immediate saying the email address does not even exist. We have given 3 days for the bidder to respond to us, but no one has.
We’ve also tracked the IP address but this did not provide much information except for the location and postcode of the “bidder”.
But then again, the bidder may not even have been a human but human-generated, ie it could have been a robot which we are told, trolls forums and submits spam comments, or tries to strike up realistic looking conversations based on other comments there. This is highly possible as both bids from this mysterious bidder had been “RM400″.
In view of the above experience, we have revised our auction rules with an additional 3 rules (Nos 4, 5 and 6). Our apologies that the rules may not sound very friendly now, but these rules will not pose any problems to genuine bidders. We hope that with the implementation of these rules, we can have some control over pranksters, trolls or robots as we really want the auctions to be clean and ethically participated in.
If you wish to bid, you may still use a pseudonym because we respect your privacy as a donor (we only request the full names of those who apply for our funds for purposes of accountability), but please use a genuine email address. Your email address will remain private as it will not be displayed in the comments section or anywhere in the blogpost.
If we receive a bid from an unfamiliar email address, we will also write to the email address to seek confirmation that it is indeed written by a human and one who has intention of following through with the bid should he/she win. So, if you are a new bidder, we will write to you while the bidding is going on and we hope you will reply as soon as you can. This is to have some measure of control to reduce the incidence of pranksters, trolls and robots from simply hiking up the bid, which is unfair and most unethical.
Meanwhile, we also welcome help and suggestions from IT-savvy readers as to how to prevent such incidence from occurring again. If prevention is not possible, we still have to minimise the occurrence. Hence, any other suggestions to amend the rules would be most appreciated too.
Thank you.
Here are our new auction rules:
Auction Rules:
1. Please check the latest comment for the latest bid before putting in yours.
2. All bids are placed as comments on this blogpost. All comments will be published instantly in chronological order.
3. The auction ends at (time and date given).
4. The winner is to bank in payment no later than 72 hours after the closing time failing which we reserve the right to offer the item to the next highest bidder or to reauction. Winners who fail to bank in payment will be barred from participating in future auctions.
5. You may use a pseudonym when placing your bid if you wish but please use a genuine email address as we need to contact you if you win. Your email address will not be displayed.
6. Please participate responsibly in the spirit of goodwill, honesty and fun!
100% of the winning bid will be channeled to our Fund for the animals.
Source: http://myanimalcare.org/2014/08/17/of-trolls-robots-and-new-..
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