*** Zero tolerance for voter fraud ***

[Diamond]

It has come to the attention of the Community Leaders that there is a possible case of voting fraud occurring in the Lite Challenge. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened over the last few months, so we are forced to take action.

What is voter fraud?
Well, in the context of this forum, it is A) creating, or having someone else, create fake accounts with the sole purpose of voting in a contest, or B) encouraging others to create an account with the sole purpose of voting in a contest. Obviously the latter is hard to prove, but the former is immediately obvious.

Why did this come up?
Community Leaders were alerted to the fact that four accounts were created within minutes of each other on the morning of August 16th. The only thing any of these four accounts has done is to vote in this month's Lite Challenge. In the interests of transparency I have decided to post the names of those four accounts, since anyone willing to dig for five minutes can find out this info anyway:

andredias
andremarcos
Elionde
marcospaulo

Why do you care?
Sadly, this is not the first time this has happened. Thankfully it has not occurred on a challenge where we have an outside sponsor offering a prize. This site was created and is run with an ethos of honesty, openness, and helpfulness, and needless to say allowing cheating to happen on a contest goes against all of those principles.

The Community Leaders are aware of what is going on, and the Admins have been notified. We may not be able to prove who the culprit is, but be aware that it has not gone unnoticed and we are taking steps to resolve this once and for all. In the meantime, I and other CLs have advocated for the removal and invalidation of those four suspicious votes from this month's Lite Challenge. Stay tuned for more information.

[Corilliant]

Oh, joy.

Quick, catch them, and put them in the stocks! We can throw rotten parchment and ink at them.

[GreatWhiteNorth]

Since those four accounts all voted for my map, I feel like I need to respond to all of this. I sent this message to Diamond, but I feel it should be made public as well:

Diamond,

I saw the message you posted about voted fraud, and of course since those accounts voted for my map, I have to address it. I want to say unequivocally that I had NO part in those four accounts being activated, and I really don't know who could have created them. I wanted to win this challenge badly, but I also wanted to win fairly, and I would not have created accounts simply to pad my votes. I understand if this unfortunate circumstance invalidates the challenge, but I wanted you to hear my side of the story before you make any kind of decision about the challenge.

In the interest of transparency, the author who commissioned my work had created an account on this website months ago, and I did encourage him to check out the challenge and vote for his map if he thought it was the best map available for voting. I thought that since he already had a account and had been active on the forum, it wouldn't be any problem to point out to him that challenge voting was currently going on.

But to reiterate, I have NO IDEA who created those four accounts. I did not, and I did not encourage any one to create them either.

-GWN

[Bogie]

Thanks for clearing this up for us GWN.

You may have an overly zealous secret admirer.

If I recall from the prior incident, it was family members who wanted to support their dad not realizing that it would be considered bad form.

In any case this has been straightened out for now. Hopefully we can find a way to prohibit this in the future.

[Deadshade]

I have also noticed soem strange votes in the past.
The way this kind of problems is handled on another site is :
To vote the account has to be older than 3 months and have a minimum of 10 posts.
A stronger requirement could be :
To vote the account has to be older than 3 months and have posted at least 1 original work.

Of course in these matters there is no absolute protection against "fake" accounts but similar measures reduce it to a minimum.

[Azélor]

Normally, most voters are well known active members or new but usually pretty active members. Or sometimes, an old member might show up.

[JefBT]

Blocking new users from voting may help. See if the only activity on the account is voting is also a way to block that, I think.

[Gamerprinter]

I'd think the same process that prevents new users from sending PMs, with a minimum of 5 posts would prevent voter fraud as well.

[Diamond]

The 5-post minimum for voting is in the pipeline, but it may be a while before it's implemented, since only the Admins can do that.

[Robbie]

I stand behind the zero tolerance rule, and in addition have finally figured out how to implement the 5 message limit for voting or creating polls. This should help discourage the behaviour.