I agree that there's probably not much abuse of perms going on, but the repeated route issue does mean that Infos on Perms potentially don't provide PoP. I think most other abuses are potentially applicable to cal events too. I was just making a point about why Infos on Perms may be regarded differently.
With the advent of amartphones etc, I think this is an issue that can affect Cal rides to, but that's a separate issue.
While one of the underlying principles is that Audax rides should be "open to all" (or until GPS is ubiquitous) I would be against making any perms (effectively) GPS-only.
This just comes back to the simple question, namely "what does anyone gain by cheating?". If someone wants to ride a perm, use their local knowledge to answer the questions and not actually ride the route, what do they gain? A few points on a web site. Big deal.
If we wanted to eliminate cheating completely we'd have to basically shut down all events as there's no way of being 100% sure that nobody cheated.
On a DIYxGPS it's pretty easy to knock up a GPX file using one of many available web sites. Some of them even conveniently "slow down" and "speed up" when going up or down hills. It wouldn't take a genius to ride a route and then doctor the file a little to extend or contract breaks, shuffle the times around a little, so it would look like the same route had been ridden twice rather than the route ridden once and a doctored file submitted a second time. Likewise it wouldn't be difficult to ride a monstrous great ride in chunks of whatever size were easy enough to do, patch the segments together, and tweak the times on waypoints so it looked like a single continuous ride.
On a regular perm there's no way of knowing whether the person did the route on a bicycle, or a motor vehicle.
On a calendar event there's no way of knowing whether a person actually rode the route, used a bit of local knowledge to answer the questions, looked it up on Street View on their smartphone, or called a friend who lives near the info controls. In theory someone could check in at a control, ride a few miles along the route, disappear off the route, put the bike in a friend's van, drive to within a few miles of the next control, wait until the appropriate time, then cycle to the next control. That way they'd check in at all the controls within the time allowed but only actually cycle maybe 5 miles between each control and drive the rest.
If people really want to go to such great lengths to cheat it seems the easiest thing to do is just leave them to it. If someone else has apparently accumulated 500 points this season without ever actually getting on their bike it doesn't change anything for me, I know my mighty total of 6 points for the season represents rides I actually did so I'm happy with that. The rider with 500 points earned by cheating is perhaps more deserving of sympathy than people scratching around trying to figure out how to stop them.
