I'm a little torn as to what to do on this as viewing logs of voting, I can see IP addresses and the very little changes in them when voting occured which means one of two things were done to...alter...voting.
The sad thing is, all 4 of the folks in the top 4 have voting fraud on it. Strangely, people who told me two certain folks should "win because they have the best" are the same ones with the most voting fraud.
Now, there are several options I can take here, including physically deleting all duplicate voting entries, or forcing people to register for the site to prevent this from happening in the future (and still resulting in having to verify they don't register multiple accounts and banning subsequent duplicate accounts for voting.)
This is the second time I've run a contest and the first time we had an issue with voting it was on a different system and the person told me that their friend found out how to vote multiple times and did it to boost her count. She asked me to delete 20 votes from her because the other person cheated.
And I understand that some of you who entered are "promoting" your pictures and asking people to vote for you. That's fine too. However, keep in mind this isn't a popularity contest. People should be voting for you because your design is GOOD, not because they're your friend. And your friends should not be cheating to get you to win.
Those who are in the top (and you can see who you are by looking at results), would you feel it's fair for me to remove the multiple entries that were done against the spirit of the competition. I clearly stated it would be voting on a trust factor and that you could only vote once...(and when the last two digits of an IP address are the only one that changes every few minutes and there are 5-10 votes from that same address...)
There will, obviously, be changes to the next contest come Christmas, so keep that in mind...but I am very unhappy with people turning this into a cheating to win contest.
The sad thing is, all 4 of the folks in the top 4 have voting fraud on it. Strangely, people who told me two certain folks should "win because they have the best" are the same ones with the most voting fraud.
Now, there are several options I can take here, including physically deleting all duplicate voting entries, or forcing people to register for the site to prevent this from happening in the future (and still resulting in having to verify they don't register multiple accounts and banning subsequent duplicate accounts for voting.)
This is the second time I've run a contest and the first time we had an issue with voting it was on a different system and the person told me that their friend found out how to vote multiple times and did it to boost her count. She asked me to delete 20 votes from her because the other person cheated.
And I understand that some of you who entered are "promoting" your pictures and asking people to vote for you. That's fine too. However, keep in mind this isn't a popularity contest. People should be voting for you because your design is GOOD, not because they're your friend. And your friends should not be cheating to get you to win.
Those who are in the top (and you can see who you are by looking at results), would you feel it's fair for me to remove the multiple entries that were done against the spirit of the competition. I clearly stated it would be voting on a trust factor and that you could only vote once...(and when the last two digits of an IP address are the only one that changes every few minutes and there are 5-10 votes from that same address...)
There will, obviously, be changes to the next contest come Christmas, so keep that in mind...but I am very unhappy with people turning this into a cheating to win contest.