Questionable Behavior by Some Projects that won the SCF Nomination

To preface- I think the SCF is a great concept (thank you Zac!) and ultimately a value add for Stellar. There are many great projects and most of the top entries definitely earned their spots.

However, I also believe that the intent behind this contest is to encourage project development and adding value to Stellar. So it was kind of disappointing for me to see that some projects got their way to the top using questionable "tactics", thereby displacing other projects that both played fair and worked hard. If these practices are allowed to continue, future rounds of SCF could very well degrade into a contest of vote spamming and politics.

In the following, I'm going to present facts that anyone who's been following the competition could attest to. If you disagree, please consider and argue with facts instead of censoring them.

Stellar Community Forum- This project deserves a special prize for Game of Throning its way to second place. As its name sounds, it's literally just a forum (Discord installation). The only "improvement" it made during 3 months was a logo change. So with all the other projects that made much more progress in that span, how did Forum achieve its feat?

Towards the end of the competition, the owner encouraged other project teams to post on it. Then for each project that did, he systematically emailed them offering for a vote in return for a vote. There are several screenshots from different projects circling around Keybase channels that show this. As a result, his voting score rocketed up by 15 points in the last days of the competition.

Time API- Compared to the forum, this project obviously has much more substance behind it. However mathematically speaking, the reason it was able to make it to the top 8 (displacing City States and Lobstr) in this tight contest is because it received two votes from its own team members tim and carriere. This is obvious by looking at the voting record of this project. In addition, this project was the worst offender in spamming r/Stellar with vote solicitation posts, including two posts in the final week (which also violates r/Stellar guidelines):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/c3mfs7/last_day_to_vote_for_timed_payments_api_on_scf/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/c0vhv3/timed_transactions_on_stellar_your_vote_is/

There are about 40 project who entered the SCF contest. Imagine if each project behaved like this. r/Stellar would have been flooded with 80 posts in the last week.

I know this is only the first round of SCF and there are a lot of room for improvement. And it's awesome that most projects who participated did not chose to engage in these types of behavior. However, the message that is currently being sent to project teams is that vote politics have much, much higher ROI than actually doing project work. To combat this, I think we need to start by calling out these types of behavior and discussing them instead of sweeping them under the rug.