You can take a peek at the vbulletin web site for more info (or actually wait for some knowledgeable people here to reply
).
In fact, the whole point is to decide whether it is worth sacrificing some of the 'fun', the free lurking and so on for a more 'honest' event.
Either way, of course, you loose something.
As zagnut says, the same thing occurred in the GOTM with the reloading issue.
There have been lots of discussions some time ago, very similar to this one: should we keep the GOTM as an open, friendly competition or set up a 'police-like' force to prevent at least the most blatant violations?
In that case it turned out that in order to give a sense to the competition -friendly as it may be- some monitoring was indeed necessary.
So, if we want to run the SGOTM in the form of a competition, even a loose one, I am afraid that we will unavoidably reach similar conclusions. Which will bring some form of control over the threads, and some metric to define when a game is so heavily cheated that it cannot be accepted for the final ranking.
This would really turn the SGOTM into another 'official competition', potentially loosing some of its appeal for some groups of players (on the other hand, it may attract others...
).
Still, this is not what I would like to see -at least, not yet.
The SGOTM is clearly different from its parent, and in my understanding the competitive side of the event is of lesser importance, being more a way to spice up the team play and to allow more teams to play the same SG than anything valuable by itself.
From this point of view, I think that some cross-lurking can be tolerated: I like a lot the idea of the 'snake' award for the obvious cases -it may actually be a good deterrent.
My feeling is that if it is clear that 'cheating' this way is not rewarded, the impact of cross-lurking can be limited. If on the other hand, the SGOTM turns into a competition to picking someone else's good idea as quickly as possible, then we will need some form of control.
Just my very humble opinion. In any case, we certainly need to define an approach regarding this point.