500.000 bills at once? What if...

[Quizmaster]

In the Dutch Forum, we're currently discussing a contest organised by Flemish radio station Radio Donna. Four hosts of this Radio Station have each spent a bill while holiday shopping, each in a certain city in Belgium, in a certain store (visible on movies on the contest's website).

This has been done before, and wouldn't be special, if only it wouldn't have become a total frenzy among Belgians. As of yet, more than 500.000 bills have been registered with the site, so the radio station claims. Probably because of this huge numbers, at least one bill spent by the radio jockeys has already been found, winning the participant 10.000 €.

Of course one will have the tendency to start phantacising: What if these bills were to be registered with EBT? Hopes have gone up since a special user has joined, earlier tonight: Radio Donna.

Of course there are certain "little" problems:
* The bills have been registered on the site without a short code, and probably without any other check to see whether the serials are real.
* The bills have been registered without the exact place they're from. The participants would have to reveal their telephone number and email adress only, not the place they live/reside.

And therefore, some serious questions are raised:
Should/would (Avij & Co., speak up! ) we allow the databases to be linked, if Radio Donna would somehow be interested in this even if it costed time and effort (keep in mind that this is not very probable, but the question is purely academic at this moment) solving the problems by:
1. .... registering all bills on Radio Donna's city (Brussels), probably skewing all distance statistics for hits? Or: registering only bills on the city that belong to users who entered a phone number with a certain area code, registering the note to the city that belongs to the area code?
2. .... allowing Radio Donna to register all bills with valid serials without a short code, possibly making it easier to "cheat together" a hit with Radio Donna? Or: would we somehow calculate or "fabricate" short codes for these bills?
3. .... checking all bills for a valid serial first (this one's pretty straightforward I think).

And:
a. Should we allow a virtual one-time user to eclipse our real flesh-and-blood superusers like ans and hoppa, making their work relatively less valuable, and present them with an opponent for the first place too formidable to tackle in the short term?
b. Would this kind of event be harmful to the privacy of the participants in the contest? (to recieve a couple of tenners from someone, and when seeing they're all registered by Radio Donna, you are pretty sure this someone has participated in this contest)

Please keep in mind that this is not only about technical feasibility, but I also try to raise some "moral" issues.

The thread on the Dutch forum.

[Nerzhul]

We are open for any kind of cooperation. The only requirement would be trustworthy and consistant data.

Missing shortcodes aren't much of a problem, but in this specific case the missing location information is. We are not going to import a bunch of notes with unknown location, what would be the point? The goal of the website is to follow Euro notes on their tracks, but in order to do so we need to know where they have been ... with a slightly finer granularity than 'Belgium'

Aside from that, I guess if we ever get some sort of cooperation going we'd have to implement a special mechanism for those "authorities". It would indeed be a bit weird and discouraging to rank a bank or radio station among normal users.

[€€F]

I would like to add an extra problem..

Sine this Radio Donna action we received many new users from Belgium..

They entered their notes and so also they entered some of the Radio Donna will be entering..

They become instant hits , and a lot..

Solution would be to modify all hits from the start of the promotion..

But many people still have the notes (they need to keep the note in their hands before end of the action)..

Seeing 500.000 in my mind I'm of course curious if one or more of them has been entered before by me.. everyone will have this.


On the other side..
How does this influence the statistics of vs. etc.

PS > as they gave their phone-nr. added to the note this could be submerged into postal code?

Last of all.. is someone in direct continious contact with Radio Donna??

[Dakkus]

We really should get a radio station do this using eurobilltracker.. They would have the same pros they get for their current system, but they wouldn't have to code the database nor the input form, as we would supply it right away.

[Mr Euro]

As far as I'm aware of, there is no request from this radiostation. So why make all the fuzz about it. A former Belgian primeminister once said: "Let's solve the problem when it occurs". I think this is the case.

By the way it's a government owned radiostation, they can't permit any problems with privacy-issues and stuff like that. That's why I don't believe there will be ever a request from them at all.

@quizmaster

Avij&Co: Co's name is Nerzhul