As you may have noticed, I haven’t asked you guys to vote for Soccerlens in the Bloggers Choice Awards. There’s a good reason for this, and I’ll explain that below. Before I kick off though, I want to thank everyone who voted for the blog, especially those two individuals who hustled their friends and spent a lot of time campaigning for the blog me.
BCA rules state that you cannot create more than one account. They also say that they monitor IP addresses to check for cheating. It seems obvious that multiple votes from the same IP address would raise a red flag and cause them to investigate the situation. BCA also reserve the right to remove votes / nominations if they suspect that cheating takes place. I will point out though that no where does it explicitly say that multiple votes from the same IP address will be removed.
I had asked a couple of friends from my old university to vote for me – that turned into a full-fledged uni-wide campaign and that helped us bridge the 100+ votes gap between Soccerlens and the top blog in the best sports category, until one morning we went top of the list. Apparently (this is my opinion) at that point the kids who run the baseball rumours blog freaked out and reported SL to the ‘authorities’. That afternoon, over 160 votes for Soccerlens were removed from the system, all of them ‘multiple votes’ from the same IP address. My old uni is behind a proxy and because of that all Internet access from that place is from the same IP address. Of course, I knew this in advance, but since the rules said nothing concrete against it and considering the fact that these guys had worked hard on getting real votes, I hadn’t been worried.
Email conversations ensued between yours truly and a customer rep from BCA. It’s a circular argument – they claim that it’s their policy to remove multiple votes from the same IP address, however if you check their rules there’s nothing of that sort. Once I pointed that out, the reply given was that BCA had the right to remove votes where they suspected ‘cheating’. However, despite repeated offers of a chance to prove that the votes were clean, they went back to the policy argument.
I’ve tried talking to the parent company, PayPerPost, but I know these people are busy and this is just one blog out of thousands of blogs participating in the awards. What I can’t stand is being wrongfully accused of cheating, and then being fed bullshit because they can’t be bothered to check each case individually.
Anyway, I just wanted you guys to know what had happened. Seeing how PPP’s Director of “Customer Love” hasn’t replied to my email for over a week, I’m not too hopeful that they’ll see reason.
Once again, thanks for voting.
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