STICKY - Dirty Bass

[crazyxray]

Dirty Bass did the "Sticky" post about our contest. I really do not understand why he did it. May he did it just in case it looks not so good for his mixes at ther moment. But this is not the way to deal his own frustration about the situation. I hope not all of you are as unfair as he is.
The competition is still running, we get about 50 new votes day by day. So please keep it up and do not care in one people´s opinion, even not he is a moderator in this forum. This is just more bad to find this post of him which gives a bad light to a good thing.

[dirty_bass]

I`ve never said it is a bad thing, read my post. This has nothing to do with your running of the competition at all.
This is about the people abusing the voting system.
Unless it is you doing it, I don`t see why you are getting silly about it.
Several people contacted me to point out how the voting system is getting abused and so I thought I would make a thread to at least give the people on here the chance to see transparent opinion.
It had nothing to do with my own entries for this remix.
Which is why I removed them.
Turning this into a personal attack against me is a little pointless, as I never made any comment about how you were running this, in any way. And what I did was to try to help out, and get some positivity out of a system open for abuse.

[crazyxray]

aha, several people contacted YOU. i see. i think it would be better to forward this e-mails, pm´s and posts to ME. because i am able to answer them because i am the only person who have the full background of the whole thing. i have enough time to answer all this stuff. this would be even better than to create a post named "sticky" about the whole thing. it´s got a bitter taste the way you do it. and that´s not what we want. i always try to play as fair as possible. and the whole contest thing gets so much good response that it is not needed to **** it up this way. may you can forward the several contacts of people to you to me.
I will have a look for them and answer them seriously. thanks in advance.

[dirty_bass]

Your missing the point again, and making it personal.
This had nothing to do with you, or how you run the competition.
I`m trying to give transparency to the process.
As you must know that the email process is not only easy to abuse, but it isn`t transparent.
Whether you take any notice of it or not, at least people on BOA would get an idea of how the votes from people within this community go.

I would have thought, having place you could go to on this website, where you could see a bunch of votes for said remixes, would be helpful to you, and I can`t see in any way how it is negative towards the competition.
Which was and it a good idea.

[crazyxray]

Your missing the point again, and making it personal.
No, i do not.

This had nothing to do with you, or how you run the competition.
I know.

I`m trying to give transparency to the process.
You are not able too because you have not seen the e-mails so far. but i can forward them to you if you like to get some 100 e-mails.

As you must know that the email process is not only easy to abuse, but it isn`t transparent.
It is not easy to abuse it. The rules say that every e-mail address can vote for each track. I check all the addresses and do not take any double votes. So please tell me how can it be abused.

Whether you take any notice of it or not, at least people on BOA would get an idea of how the votes from people within this community go.
Everybody can feel free to post his/her vote in here too. But this way you will just see the BOA users votes which are not even 50% of all the incoming votes. And this will bring chaos to the whole thing. Maybe there are reworks with a lot of votes from BOA users which have not any votes from the other places where i post it. So this will not bring any transparancy to it.

I would have thought, having place you could go to on this website, where you could see a bunch of votes for said remixes, would be helpful to you, and I can`t see in any way how it is negative towards the competition.
Which was and it a good idea.
I see all the votes because they come to my e-mail address. People have to trust me in this case.

[xfive]

As you must know that the email process is not only easy to abuse, but it isn`t transparent.
It is not easy to abuse it. The rules say that every e-mail address can vote for each track. I check all the addresses and do not take any double votes. So please tell me how can it be abused.


When I get back from lunch I will describe how easily this is done.

And it involves my friend Perl.

[dirty_bass]

Whether you take any notice of it or not, at least people on BOA would get an idea of how the votes from people within this community go.

Everybody can feel free to post his/her vote in here too. But this way you will just see the BOA users votes which are not even 50% of all the incoming votes. And this will bring chaos to the whole thing. Maybe there are reworks with a lot of votes from BOA users which have not any votes from the other places where i post it. So this will not bring any transparancy to it.

Correct, the answer is in the question.
That`s the point, people will only get to see the votes of BOA users. That`s all I intended. Just a little idea for people in this little community to see how the voting would stand here. It`s not intended for you to use in any way.
In terms of BOA it will bring some transparency. As for the rest...who knows.

[xfive]

Ok here goes.

A skilled programmer could write a very smart script in an hour or two time that would generate emails in any which way they wanted them. Unique email addresses, random votes, different messages therein... even timed such that they would trickle out over the course of a few days.
I'd be very, very, VERY surprised if you could tell if they were real or not, because if you could, that would mean you'd have some very low level understanding of how email systems work, which obviously is not the case since you chose that to be the mechanism by which these votes are carried out.

How do you think spammers do their thing? It's the exact same mechanism.

A better way to do it would have been to have people go to a site to vote, and before their vote is counted, a message is sent to the email address they used, with a unique link in it.
When that unique link is clicked, it proves that they were able to receive that email, and that the address is valid, and then their vote is registered.
No this does not stop people from having multiple email accounts, but yes, it does protect you from doing what I have described above, which as I said, would be difficult for you to figure out.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here. But you wanted to know. So there it is.

I'm sure there are tons of people out there who know languages such as Perl and PHP, many of which you probably know, that would have been glad to help you write a system similar to what I proposed. It would not take more than a couple hours worth or work at most, all you had to do was ask. I'm sure even here on BOA alone there are quite a few people that would have volunteered a couple hours of time to write it. (Myself included).

I am not implying that any of the votes that have been cast have been done by this method. I am simply illustrating to you just how high the potential for abuse is.

Banking on the fact that people will play honest is pretty silly.

Now get out your text editors kids! :lol:





Er... no please don't :shock:

[mux]

From the warning on polls in Slashdot (which is essentially the exact same code as polls in phpBB2 or any other content management slash forum site):

- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.

- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.

- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

[crazyxray]

o.k., o.k., it seams you are right. i am not a programmer and also not a hacker. but if it is possible to abuse the e-mail system it must also work to abuse any other way of poll system. there is nothing out there what is save isn´t it?

[xfive]

o.k., o.k., it seams you are right. i am not a programmer and also not a hacker. but if it is possible to abuse the e-mail system it must also work to abuse any other way of poll system. there is nothing out there what is save isn´t it?

You're right man. But think about it like this:

Let's say someone wanted to abuse it the other way, first they would have to go sign up for bunches of free email accounts... that takes some time right there.
They would then have to then go in by hand and fill out the voting form every time for each email address (they wouldn't be able to script that part because there would be checks in the system that would make sure that the voting can only be invoked via the site, and could also check and make sure one vote can be cast from each IP address).
They would then have to go check each and every one of those email accounts and click on the links.

If you a long time to do this you may be able to accomplish adding a few extra votes to skew the system... but that's certainly no where near as abusive as the way it is now.

So no there is nothing that is 100% safe, but again there are ways to trim it down. and make it very difficult and time consuming for anyone to do so... certainly much more work than it would take to whip up a quick script... and with a little investigation I'm sure any suspicous votes could be weeded out.

I'm sure some people can think up some other ways, maybe even less prone to abuse.... anyone have ideas?

DNA Samples? :lol:

[xfive]

- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.[/b]

Exactly. :lol:

[koma]

oh, come on.. whats next? conspiracy theory?

the guy probably send an email to some people or he posted the info on some board where he has lots of fans..

this packages are way to big for me to d/l them with my crappy dial up connection.. I heard maybe half of the works, maybe even a bit a less..and who knows, maybe I'll vote for the best of those that I heard.. so?

[xfive]

oh, come on.. whats next? conspiracy theory?

the guy probably send an email to some people or he posted the info on some board where he has lots of fans..


I'm sure you're right. But that is not the point at all. :roll: