First and foremost, we’d like to thank everyone who’s participated in the contest these last few weeks. It’s been a learning experience for us and we appreciate everyone who signed up and had fun with us. That being said, we’d also like to reassure everyone that we did the best we could to try and stem cheating. While we’d like to apologize for not foreseeing every possible eventuality as far as ways people could potentially exploit the system, we don’t feel sorry for trying to provide something fun for everyone, and we don’t speak for those people who decided to take it upon themselves to try and spoil everyone’s fun. We do, however, have no hesitation in showing you guys some of the nefarious efforts that were at work while you guys tried to have some good clean competition.
There was this guy:

He had the idea of trading YouTube subscriptions for votes. Not terribly fair. And if it was fair, why did he feel the need to set up a front so we couldn’t track where the votes were coming from?

And this guy:

He was paying people to vote for him. Yeah, this is the type of stuff we had to deal with.
Then we had plenty of folks who were simply manipulating their IP address and making fake accounts to run up the votes themselves.

You can enter any of those IP addresses here to see that they are either proxy or spam: http://stopforumspam.com/search
We’ll let the community do with these what they will. We like to think you guys will chase them to a windmill with flaming torches and pitchforks and then set the windmill on fire.
Again, we tried the best we could to implement deterrents for this sort of thing, but if Major League Baseball has taught us anything, cheaters are going to cheat no matter what you do. You guys like baseball, right? Good. Those guys are all cheaters.
Thanks again to everyone who participated.









Comments ( 7 )