its Saturday, 9:14pm pst .. and bud melvin is getting 1 vote every 1-3 mins steadily. He has climbed steadily from 160 to over 230 in the past few hours.

whats up with that?

GEEEZEEEEEEEEEE come on dude.. do you have to cheat??

or better yet.. im curious as to what purple guys referrer reports say on the log file as to where the votes are coming from

he he
-A lil Web girl

It would not take much to cheat, and it sucks to think that someone would go that far. Dorks.

Keep in mind that if it IS cheating, it's
probably not Bud. If it is, it's probably
either someone trying to queer the whole
deal, or some misguided fan.

The H's are worried, I need to go calm them.

Peace.

Johnney

I have been watchin the polls ...cause I have no life and johnney was in the lead for awhile.....then wtf did BUD come from???? His votes have been going up at a constant rate for the past hour. SOmething is fishy here!
Johnney is so funny.........I loved his oddtood remake of HungrAAy like the wolf! LMFAO!!!

I agree Bud Melman's score looks suspicious, but if he's playing shows, he could easily mention during each gig that everyone should go vote for him, which might lead to an isolated rush to the polls like we're seeing.

Also, I can't figure out how he could be cheating! I've been trying to vote for Johnney every day, and it only counted my vote once! I went to the computer lab at school and voted once from each computer there too, but that's only 20 more votes. How could you get 300 votes!

Wayne

Dude, you can't even download their song! Been trying to download their stuff for a few days and their site is down.

As for the excuse that if they played somewhere they would get votes: It started in the afternoon and went on through the night. Over 200 votes at a consistant and steady rate. If they are cheating, they should be thrown out.

Scott

I don't want to say how here, because it is frikin' easy, and I don't want anyone to learn how from me. Take my word for it. It's harder to make Capt'n Oddtodd's Tuna Mac Surprise.

on behalf of "the leroys" who i shall speak for we think that the "bud" vote has been augmented by some means [and those means is not honest means - know what i means?]

yass-sir we thinks theres some shenanigans going on :-)

Cheaters go home. Kick bud out of the contest.

I'd like to think no one is cheating. It would hurt my feelings as someone who actually voted for Bud, especially since you guys are now loosing your venom on him.

Cheaters do, please , go home! I wanted Bud to win but only fairly.

Why is no one wondering about Mark Bates? Didn't his score shoot up out of nowhere too.

Everyone knows that there is going to be some people voting more than once it is the nature of internet so everyone needs to calm down before someone gets their eye poked out...then don't come cryin' to me when it happens.

both mark and bud shot up rather sudden-like

I entered a song in this contest. I've been watching the scores. I've been reading the posts in the forum. Tsk, tsk, tsk -- if someone is cheating, they're cheating right? But am I the only one who is over (considerably) 18 in here? It just sounds like everyone is whining like we're all in junior high school playing dodge ball or something. I make my living making creating commercial music. Sometime you get the job and sometimes you don't -- regardless of whether someone is sleeping with the client (i.e. - cheating) or not. It's just a contest that's supposed to be fun -- and it's not our contest, it's Todd's. I'm pretty sure that he's on the ball with this (kudos to him for doing all the work in putting this together!) so if anyone is to hand out "retribution", let it be him, not the angry-cause-their-fave-band-ain't-winning masses.

What DES said!

It's currently 2:53pm EST. Bud's score has gone up at a rate of 1/min for the last 30 mins.

As for Mark Bates, He does have alot of votes, but I never noticed a huge jump. I actually just voted for him from about 15 computers in my high school just so "Cheating Bud" won't win.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to take the 3 top vote getters, and have a run off where you have to send an email to vote?

ps, please come to see me in Vegas, where I do several Duran Duran numbers.

Hmmm, one of the prizes is to have PurpleGuy redesign your site. Would you want them to do it if they can;t deign a contest that people can't cheat at?

Wayne

the only way to restrict voting is by IP or cookie. If you have AOL or a dynamic IP via modem, DSL or cable you get a different IP address each time you log on. EMO has a damn static IP. So I voted once. Then there is cookie, the fact is that is easier to cheap on since you can delete those pretty easy.

if your into baseball check out the results of the all star game. For years they have spend millions YES MILLIONS on perfecting internet voting. This year Shinjo of the Giants got huge numbers and sucks. WHY? cause Japanese voters know his name over say a Brian Giles. My point is not some baseball lesson as i could really care less, but to show that before you cast a company or persons in a dark light KNOW the facts.

I never read anywhere that the person with the most votes wins anyway. i think its up to todd. maybe a representive of each the persons giving prizes gets a vote , todd then the winner of the vote gets a point. This way relogging on over and over won't seem like such a wise choice in time management. PS if you'd like to be on my buddy list and your on a dynamic IP HI THERE...

Saying that MLB is an example of "best practices" is like saying a chihuahua is a dog. Sure, it is actually a dog, but it's not a very good one!

It would have been very easy to ensure better voting. The current set up smacks of very little planning.

As an example:

If voters have to register, get mailed a "ballot password" , and then have to input their password when they vote? If you took it one step further, and used the above situation, PLUS showed an image of a number, that the user had to input (you've seen this on some sites already I'm sure), that would have limited voting to humans only, as opposed to the scripts that are currently running now.

Example 2:

A MUCH MUCH easier and better decision would have been to have an applet that people voted in, and then posted back to the server. The apple could do all sorts of very clever verification, and with a little obfuscation, the class file would be somewhat unreadable, preventuing all but the most dedicated from cheating.

The unique ip system discriminates anyway against people who are behind a proxy server.

By and large, I think that this system was set up to encourage cheating, so CHEAT ALL YOU CAN. VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN!!!!

thanks Richard, and i guess it is clear that there is a script running for old Bud and maybe others... and I know what ya mean about proxy servers, I emailed a bunch of friends about it and they told me that it said they already voted, and they had not voted. and just to clear the air of some others problems with ME. YES, I am NOT a musician. But I was hoping to use the servervices won ( besides the tickets) to promote a new company I'm starting after being unemployed for a year. Let me just tell ya its brutal out there.

> By and large, I think that this system was set
> up to encourage cheating, so CHEAT ALL YOU CAN.
> VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN!!!!

I'm assuming that this is a joke, but anyways.

First and foremost, this is a fun thing. The
H's and I had fun doing it. Well, I guess it
sucked for H2 for a split second there. We're
campaigning, but not cheating. Winning by
cheating would be, for us, a lot worse than
losing. It's a Karma thing, it's an honour
thing, it's a pride thing.

Peace.

Johnney

I guess Bud Melvin read the posts and started voting for someone else to cover himself...I just watched Mark Bates score SHOOT up!

I actually had been joking about the vote early and vote often, but now I think we'll just have to have a redo to be fair.

I'm off to chase some replicants.

hmmm perhaps those that are like cheating.. should be like umm disqualified.. i dunno.. just a thought.

Cheaters never win.. and winners never cheat..

thats my philisophical moment of the day

xoxo

Hi, I'm John. Of the John Benjamin Band, natch.

I kinda figured I'd enter this contest and that people would listen and pick their favorite and be on their way.

It never occurred to me that people would walk around their school computer labs voting for the song they like multiple times, or that people would rig up some kind of DOS hack to foul up the voting. Heck, it didn't even occur to me to try and get my friends to vote. I told them about the contest, sure, but I don't expect anybody to vote for my song just because it's mine.

But I guess because there are prizes on the line people feel a little more incentive to get as many votes however they can.

If you want a fair contest, it seems to me you'd have to obscure exactly who you're voting for until you've voted. Todd went part of the way by randomizing the order of presentation. But you'll have to go further-- randomize the names. Give each song a number, and have the number be random each time the page is loaded. So if you listen to all the songs, you can just remember which one you liked and vote for it, but you can't vote for the same one over and over because it's different each time. You can't tell who is who without listening.

Add to that a cookie/php script (encrypted so you can't decipher its contents) that remembers which songs you've clicked on, and labels them if you, say, listen to a few and then come back.

The other solution, I think, is to have the contest and make the prize a t-shirt. An old t-shirt, possibly with some stains. That way only wackos like me who, once the idea is in our head, couldn't possibly *not* complete the challenge will enter.

Anyway, the contest was good for me no matter what. I got an email from somebody saying they dug my song and requesting a CD, and that "Dotcommer" guy in that other thread felt compelled to rally the troops in support of my porned-up Girls on Film.

Ciao,

JB, of the JBB

Hey everyone,

I just found this while googling around. I missed this when the contest was live. Todd did contact me about the suspiscious voting and I wasn't able to determine who it was. I did ask around which is why the crazy voting might have stopped. My vote actually went to Swedish Masturbation Unit, IIRC.

Hope you enjoyed the song and the Def Leppard one too.

Peace,

Bud