We have considerable trust in the users of our application and we would like each user to have fun in the spirit of fair play. Unfortunately, our intentions do not always align with reality, so our team regularly verifies the photos added to activities by challenge participants to confirm that each activity recorded in Activy and assigned to a challenge has indeed been completed, rather than just recorded in history as a "ghost activity."
There are many challenges and even more participants, not to mention activities. To efficiently verify photos added to all manually added activities in the application across all challenges, we need an established photo verification system.
One might think that currently such verification occurs 100% without human involvement. However, we realize that such solution is not suitable for application users because human judgment is necessary for evaluating each activity. This doesn't mean we don't use algorithms, automation, and other modern conveniences 😅. We leverage many tools, but before any activity is removed, it must be verified by a member of our team.
We verify photos and activities from a specific challenge twice a month, although some challenges may be verified more frequently. Therefore, inappropriate activities with attached photos may appear in the application, but they are removed by us on the verification day!
Step 1: Manually adding activities to a challenge, with or without a photo. 📸
The first step is, of course, for the user to add an activity in the application. All manually added activities must include an appropriate photo confirming the completion of the activity. You can read about what photos to add to activities in another article in our FAQ: LINK.
The first stage in our system is to filter out activities to which no photo has been added. All activities without an attached photo, when one should be included, are deleted by us.
Step 2: Filtering activities with attached photos and reviewing data. 👀
Once we have removed activities that had no attached photos, we naturally move on to the next activities, those with attached photos.
We verify activities individually for each challenge within a specific time period. This means that we don't review, for example, photos from four different challenges at once; instead, we focus on a specific challenge and time frame, such as the last week. We try to choose time frames so that up to 400 photos from activities are verified at once. This is important because we verify each activity individually.
It's understood that the content of the photo is essential. However, before we get to that, we start with interpreting specific data.
The data we have about the photo includes:
- date and time the photo was taken.
- model of the phone from which the photo was taken.
- in some cases, the location where the photo was taken.
The most important metadata is the date and time the photo was taken - it helps us establish two things:
- whether the photo was taken on the same day and at similar times to when the user recorded the activity. If not, the activity is deleted by us ❌
- if we don't have access to metadata, we verify whether the photo was not downloaded from the internet or if the user didn't add the same photo to another activity. If either of these scenarios is true, the activity is deleted by us ❌
Other metadata is only useful when we are unsure about the correctness of the attached photo. For example, we verify whether a photo of a basketball was taken on a court, at home, or in a store in a shopping mall.
Step 3: Verifying the content of the photo. 📸
Once we've confirmed that the photo is from the correct day and time and was taken in the appropriate place, we focus on the photo itself, specifically what it depicts.
Activities with, for example, photos where nothing is visible are primarily removed. Black backgrounds, photos of walls, or floors are a few examples of inappropriate photos added to activities.
There are certain differences between challenge rules, so we cannot list all types of photos that are unequivocally removed by us. We always recommend checking with the challenge coordinator on the company side what photos added to activities are accepted in a specific challenge.
In summary:
- We recommend familiarizing yourself with our entire FAQ to learn, among other things, how we operate and how to correctly record activities.
- It's not worth cheating!
- We work on activity verification, but we need more time than an hour from the suspicious activity's completion.
- We are thorough in what we do and strive to maintain the spirit of fair play in every challenge.