Thank you for your insight into the inner workings. It cleared up a lot of questions.
I would like to offer some ideas regarding some issues you brought up
- I am against locking people out from choosing the games they rate. Some games might simply not work on your setup with no fault of the creator and some others are just not fun for you. First of all Jams need to be fun.
- Content creators should be able to participate and win. They often are where they are because of the jam and provide an example of what is possible to make in this time frame (good reference and goal to strive towards). Then there is also the problem of who a content creator is. Do we draw the line at 1Million, 100k, 10k, has created 100+ games? This seems too broad and inconsistent.
- Put up an e-mail or forum where participants can report unsportsmanlike behavior, so a mod doesn't need to look thru all participants. We don't need to catch 'em all, only the most extreme cases. I had a chat with one guy who did this rating spam and after only one talk where he told me that he wasn't very confident in his english and me encouraging him to write as good as he can, even even when not perfect, he started to create much better comments.
- Get some community mods. I am convinced that there are plenty of people willing to spend one hour or two cleaning up the forums and making the experience more pleasant for the others. If you demand them to write a detailed explanation for their disciplinary measures you could even allow them to ban people.
- You should encourage the r4r's to group themselves into different r4r categories. One category only browser games, only windows, only mac, only linux. In these categories everyone would know that the people in there will certainly rate them back. Otherwise you will end up with 10k r4r community topics by the end of the jam. That would be impossible to moderate all by yourself.
I hope that you will find a way to mitigate the current mess and prepare better procedures for the next one.