How are winners chosen?
Every contest on DareBay uses one of three selection types. Organizers pick at creation and can't switch mid-contest.
RANDOM (among top-liked)
When the submission window closes, the system takes the top-N most-liked works and picks winners at random from that pool.
- Good for: giveaways, low-judgment contests, hype campaigns.
- Feels like: a lottery with a popularity filter.
- What participants do: submit something people will like; the rest is luck.
CREATOR_DECISION
After the deadline, the organizer reviews submissions and names winners themselves — by the selection deadline they committed to at creation.
- Good for: subjective quality (design, writing, craft), curator-type contests.
- Feels like: a traditional juried competition.
- What participants do: follow the brief to the letter and show real quality.
- Trust note: creator-decision contests rely on the organizer's rating. Low-rated organizers running subjective contests get less engagement — for good reason.
VIEWER_VOTING
Submissions enter a voting phase where viewers can vote (one vote per account per contest). Top vote-getters win.
- Good for: community-defining contests, brand activations, anything where "who the crowd likes" is the whole point.
- Feels like: a talent-show final.
- What participants do: submit, then rally honest support (sharing your work is fine; botting is not).
Anti-rigging
Across all three types:
- Sockpuppet likes/votes are detected and dropped. Repeated attempts get accounts banned.
- Organizers can't vote on their own contests.
- Participants can't vote for their own submissions.
- Suspicious patterns (thousands of votes from one IP, coordinated timing, freshly-created accounts voting in lockstep) trigger review and, if confirmed, recount.
What if a winner is unresponsive?
If a named winner doesn't claim within the claim window, the prize either rolls down to the next-ranked submission (voting / top-liked contests) or the organizer picks again (creator-decision). The claim window is shown on every winner notification.
→ See also: Create your first contest, fake submissions.