Don't you find it strange this situation.
- There are participants in the contest;
- No one strategy is running;
- Some people have popularity points. First I thought that are given in order of joining and it's OK, but then I saw that some of this people have up to 167 unique visitors?!

It means that the visitors come and doesn't matter if you run your strategy or even if you don't have strategy.
So why these visitors come to these users?
First potential answer is: These users have so much friends and they ask them to come to get more IPs. Here the question is "is it OK?"
I could use a small banner position on my friends site to invite my friends.... is it OK?

Second potential answer is: This people come to these users because this users are popular from previous contests. Here the question is "Why the previous popularity affects this month popularity?". Is it fair to use this factor in strategy measurement if users gain popularity even without strategy?

I think that the popularity is OK in the Trader contest and is great and important in the Article contest, but is meaningless in the Strategy contest with all this comments and likes to machine generated positions. What could you comment about such a position?
"This is great position!" Ha ha! This position is as great as other positions because is generated from the same rules. Some scripts have more positions, some have less. With popularity points we say that strategy with more positions is better than strategy with less positions, because the first is more popular. Maybe is better to have popularity linked to the strategy or to user, but not to positions.......

What do you think?

agree

I was disappointed from the construction of its popularity and its weight on the outcome

Dude, don't be such naive. These are not real visitors but web crawler robots.
Dokascopy should remove popularity points from the automated strategy contest and use one year backtest results instead.

The best traders should win, the best strategies should win, the best articles should win, period. Due to the popularity points that often does not happen. Basically quality is not that important, because spam and friend-voting-for-friend will be a key factor in deciding these contests.

It makes me laugh when I see someone losing almost 100% of their contest capital after 4-5 days having 50 likes/votes or so...Seriously, what is there to like?

Popularity is ridiculous, even in the article contest. There is absolutely no correlation between number of votes/comments and quality of the article (if anything there's actually a negative correlation...). What exists is "I vote for you, and then you vote for me".