Update March 13, 2024: The MakerWorld account has posted an update regarding these new actions.
They received more than 300 reports in 12 hours and have been hard at work reviewing them all. All those reports gave them some insights on how to improve the process:
- So, the models will be removed from the contest page for reports about past violations and violations up until March 15, but no points will be deducted.
- Starting from March 16, we will begin the deduction of points for all models identified as violations.
- This rule will be added to the Contest Rule Page in future contests.
- If you believe your model was falsely removed, tell them through a ticket and offer your reasons. If you accidentally enter the wrong contest, the simplest way is to re-upload the model and enter the correct contest.
Finally, it also appears that some people are falsely reporting models, and in the words of MakerWorld, “some even competitive for winning awards.”
Therefore, they recommend that you include the following information in your report to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the procedures.
- The specific contest you believe this model is irrelevant to.
- The reason you believe why this model is irrelevant.
If they identify a user as deliberately reporting innocent models that fulfill contest themes, there will be consequences for repeated offenders.
If you have been on MakerWorld for some time now, you know that they publish a new contest every week. You also know then that it’s often riddled with spam of models unrelated to the design contest at all. If you are wondering why people would do that, it’s pretty simple: they are trying to get attention to their models so that people would download/print them, earning them some points in order to get coupons.
Yet, we believe we can all agree that this is deteriorating the user experience when browsing the design contest entries. The folks at MakerWorld also think this and are taking some actions to combat this:
- They will deduct 50 points from the user’s account for each confirmed irrelevant model uploaded to the contest page.
- If a single user violates this rule up to three times, that user will be banned from entering future contests.
MakerWorld doesn’t say if this is retroactive or only starting from now.
If you would like to help MakerWorld detect this kind of spam, you are encouraged to report the models and share the following information:
- A clear description of the issue
- which contest this model is participating in
To report a model on the web, you need to click on the 3 dots next to the name above the print profiles:
Then select report:
On mobile, the procedure is mostly the same click on the 3dots in the right corner:
Then select report:
