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  •   6 months ago

List of projects that may have broken the rules

I'm starting a thread to start a discussion about winning projects that may have broken the hackathon rules.

The first most obvious one is the native first place winner NEARPoint who have submitted the same project to many hackathons which is easily found by looking at their devpost page https://devpost.com/samurangedd or github page https://github.com/altaga/

  • 18 comments

  •   •   6 months ago

    For the next project, I don't want to accuse because there's not enough evidence. I just find it suspicious they only have 3 commits. They may have moved it over from another repo of something, but I find that defeats the purpose of using GitHub to verify they were actually building during the allotted time.

    They are the indices project https://devpost.com/software/indices-finance and here are their commits https://github.com/haardikk21/indices-fi/commits/main

  •   •   6 months ago

    The heritage project https://devpost.com/software/heritage-1fyiq4 also only has 3 commits https://github.com/layinka/near-heritage/commits/main

  •   •   6 months ago

    There are also many winning projects that don't link to their GitHub for some reason so I am unable to verify using this method.

  •   •   6 months ago

    This project https://devpost.com/software/near-smart-events has a massive initial commit the week before the hackathon ends https://github.com/domingosl/nse/commit/f328eca3d2da255c98913275f7808a19a6a64087#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5

  •   •   6 months ago

    Another project with a massive initial commit 1 week before hackathon ends

    https://devpost.com/software/yinbox
    https://github.com/jnlewis/yinbox-app/commit/ae75488ef18790c67f653e6ef0e2fa5d78aaef10

  •   •   6 months ago

    Near Smart Events is mine, the big initial commit is because I was working alone so I did not needed to share code with others (I created the repo way after starting the coding), after the initial big commit the next ones were small fixes and not core functionalities

  •   •   6 months ago

    This project is hard to tell, but considering the first commit was 2 weeks before the end of the hackathon and it seems like so much work would've needed to go into the project I feel it should be looked into. Also the github user is private for some reason.

    https://devpost.com/software/geovox

  •   •   6 months ago

    https://devpost.com/software/dtelecom
    Massive initial commit days before hackathon ends. Might be duplicate of another one of his projects but don't have time to go through all the code https://github.com/fffilimonov/tonstarter-twa

  •   •   6 months ago

    I'm pretty tired of going through projects so I'm gonna call it, but honestly I think all the winners should be reviewed. At the very least their GitHub's should be looked at. Very few have enough commits to make it seem like it was actively worked on throughout the hackathon (and that just of those that link to a GitHub).

  •   •   6 months ago

    I posted my concerns about Careerhub being in track 2 to 3 and time commits considering they did the same project at nearcon 3 months ago.

    https://devpost.com/annliew-16

  • Private user

    Private user   •   6 months ago

    https://devpost.com/software/near-road-icm this is the same project that was submitted to multiple hackathons with no modification at all and no integration with NEAR

  • Manager   •   6 months ago

    Hey folks! Please note that every project's GirHub was reviewed by at least 2 of our DevRel engineers. Uploading the project in 3 commits is not prohibited by the rules.
    The rest of the cases will be thoroughly investigated, stay tuned for the updates.

  •   •   6 months ago

    @Maria Yarotska Thank you for the update. I agree that uploading a project using just three commits is not a rule breaker, but it should be a red flag for further questions or investigations. For example, we built the NEAR notary from scratch and have 195 commits, which is a pretty small team. If you worked weeks on a project, you would see a good amount of commits. If it is copied from another project, you will see little to no commits. The DevRel engineers should know this and ask more questions, in our opinion.

  •   •   6 months ago

    Hello Ian McCann.

    https://github.com/fffilimonov/tonstarter-twa is a forked repo of some DeFI project based on TON.
    It completely different.

    Yes. There was a massive initial commit days before hackathon because it was in private repo while active deelopment.

    Thank you

  •   •   6 months ago

    I am happy to dive deep to investigate but are these discussions even going to be considered @Maria?

  •   •   6 months ago

    Yeah I agree low commits is not enough, but it should require the team to look further. I also think NEAR should change its policy on this. I've worked in other hackathons that require you to use one repo the whole time and it makes it near impossible to cheat. There's no reason to use a private repo.

    Also I don't understand why some projects have chose to have hidden users in their GitHub and some projects don't link to GitHubs at all. What's the point of an MIT license on a GitHub I can't even find? There is just a lot of sketchiness going on with the winners and considering the lack of due diligence on the teams part it seems like it be very easy to win with a previously built project.

  •   •   6 months ago

    Check this I found this in 30 mins, there could be more

    https://gist.github.com/therealharpaljadeja/087b76d8b199de42935f3c24b20bb670

  •   •   6 months ago

    @Maria, about this claim "Please note that every project's GirHub was reviewed by at least 2 of our DevRel engineers"

    I have no reason to believe you're not telling the truth, so far everything has been fantastic with you and Devpost, BUT, I think you guys should check internally if that really happened because everything points to a failed/insufficient check. One example: The new winner Chatme has several updates to the application even after the extended submission period, which is clearly against the rules: https://storage.googleapis.com/openscreenshot/R%2F7%2Fs/a-tTbns7R.png

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