First instance of one user copying another user's work. What are your thoughts?
Hey everyone,
My site Frontend Mentor is a place where front-end developers can go to practice the skills while working to a design.
I've recently launched a platform where users can submit solutions, which can be liked and commented on. Likes count towards a user's "Solution Score".
One user has just submitted a solution that is obviously a clone of another user's GitHub repo for the same challenge.
With the fact that every user's solution is going to be public on GitHub, this is going to be really hard to guard against. Yet I don't want the site to become a place where people just clone the best solutions and post it as their own in order to gain points.
It's actually making me re-think having "Likes" on the site at all. It's not like a forum or blogging platform where plagiarism is immediately obvious. So it could easily be gamed by people trying to game the platform to boost their profile scores.
Has anyone got any thoughts on this? I'm keen to hear some alternative suggestions.
That's definitely a tough one. I poked around a bit on the posted solutions, and I agree that removing Likes and the Solution Score might help solve the problem, and keep the focus on getting feedback.
A more bulletproof solution might be to check new solutions against existing solutions, but that would be a significant amount of work that might not be worth it in the end. Sorry I don't have any more helpful suggestions! D:
Thanks for your input Jessica. Yeah, the more I think about it the less I like the fact that there are Likes on the platform for solutions.
I thought it would be a good idea as it is a typical feature on platforms, but in this instance I think it does more harm than good.
In the long run checking new solutions against existing would be the best approach for sure. But it would definitely be overkill in the short term.
Also, if live streaming were to have some place on the platform in the future there will always be duplicate solutions anyway!
Plenty to think about! 🙂