"A BAND" Temporarily Removed from wMD

[grexican]

Last night mosey wiped clean the votes for A BAND.  The same 14 people (all ironically AOL addresses) voted for only that band and all were 10s.  This morning, all the votes were re-added the same.

Because this is an obvious attempt at boosting ratings and because they were willing to do it a second time they have been removed until the new site goes live (I think this Friday).

When the new site goes live, users will be able to see who voted for each song and how they voted as well as being able to see how a specific user voted site wide.  By no longer allowing this to be anonymous I think that people will take the voting more seriously and it will be easier for users that notice things like this to inform us of who is doing it and to which bands.

If anyone (including the band) has anything to add to this please feel free to post your comments.  Don't reply just to flame, we've already had enough of that on this matter, which is why Mosey is changing it around.  But if you have constructive feedback about the new system or something you'd like to see in the new system please let us know.

Again, thanks to mosey for his incredible work on the WMD.  You're my boy, blue!  

 -eli

[radiowazee]

I've removed references to "THE BAND" name in your post Eli ... Let's deal with the issue with them directly, and somewhat privately ... cool?

A couple of points to consider ...

Hits from AOL users, because they all go through proxy web servers to access the public internet, will appear as coming from multiple IP address ... http requests for a single "user session" will show up in the logs as coming from different servers (IP addresses or host names).  So, if a single person were to hammer the voting we would see those votes coming from multiple sources.  So, I could see this being the result of a single "human user" or maybe 1-2 users... seems unlikely that 14 people would rally together to spoof the voting ... which brings me to a second consideration ...

On the flip side, I don't want to penalize bands with active (and effective), online fans.  It's entirely possible that a band could rally its online fan base to cast their vote(s) in the WMD.  I would think just about any band could rally up 14 fans... Let's be sure this isn't the case with THE BAND's votes.  I'd rather err on the side of assuming the best in people than be excessive in our policing of the WMD.

I hope the case with THE BAND's votes is the latter, and not the former.  Mosey's new features with respect to tracking votes is the best solution, and they will certainly help alleviate the problem.  I think this will suffice.

For what its worth, although I use the ratings as a guide to help pick songs to add to the broadcast I audition EVERY song uploaded to the WMD and ultimately add the music I like.  Songs with high ratings, but that I don't particularly care for don't make it to the playlist.

This doesn't keep folks from potentially wasting their time and downloading tracks with high ratings that have been spoofed ... but rest assured, our playlist is safe.

Howard

[mosey]

Hits from AOL users, because they all go through proxy web servers to access the public internet, will appear as coming from multiple IP address ... http requests for a single "user session" will show up in the logs as coming from different servers (IP addresses or host names).  So, if a single person were to hammer the voting we would see those votes coming from multiple sources.  So, I could see this being the result of a single "human user" or maybe 1-2 users... seems unlikely that 14 people would rally together to spoof the voting ... which brings me to a second consideration ...

On the flip side, I don't want to penalize bands with active (and effective), online fans.  It's entirely possible that a band could rally its online fan base to cast their vote(s) in the WMD.  I would think just about any band could rally up 14 fans... Let's be sure this isn't the case with THE BAND's votes.  I'd rather err on the side of assuming the best in people than be excessive in our policing of the WMD.

Just to be clear, we are talking about email addresses all @aol.com not IP's, and for 14 of 14 members of your online fanbase to all respond within 8 hours and recast their votes on our site would be a *very* active fanbase ;-)

Another thing that would help a little is if you had yabb require email validation before users became registered.

[radiowazee]

Another thing that would help a little is if you had yabb require email validation before users became registered.

Users have been required to validate with an email addres for the past month or so.