You may have noticed the totals in the Saffron Song poll have come down. I had to moderate things a bit.
Some quick info on computers: every computer has an IP address which tells the network/Internet/whatever where that computer is. Many online polls record IP addresses to prevent people from voting more than once with the same computer. However, this isn’t perfect because groups of computers in the same network (such as a workplace or a computer lab) could show up as the same IP address. And tracking by IP got even trickier when Internet Service Providers began using groups of rotating IP numbers that were assigned at random whenever a computer logged on, because it meant that the same computer might get a different IP address (allowing the same computer to vote again) or a computer that was not used to vote might temporarily get an IP address that the poll recorded (meaning someone who had not persdonally voted would be blocked). So most online polls offer a choice of either restricting votes by IP address or by cookies. The poll system I’m using for the Saffron voting uses cookies.
Which is another problem, since someone could vote, delete their cookies, and vote again, repeat as desired. Or the poll might not care if your computer doesn’t save cookies, I dunno. Either way, some multi-voting seems to have been happening with the Saffron votes.
Thing is, I don’t know that for sure. Could have been accidental, could have been someone’s entire workplace showing their support. I don’t know, and have no way of telling. So what I’ve decided to do — knowing that anything I decided would probably be unfair to somebody — was to go through the poll responses, find the ones with duplicate IP addresses, and trim back those votes if they were over a certain number.
There’s no way this can be anything approaching a “scientific” poll anyway, but hopefully this will keep the results closer to actual individual votes. Please, if you’ve already voted, don’t try voting again. This is for fun, folks, I’d like to keep it that way. Also, I have to go through it and remove entries one by one and it’s a pain…
Feel free to comment on this decision, I’d like to know what you think.
I think you were wise to prune the numbers to the extent that you could. I still see a lot of seriously questionable results but that’s what happens with Internet popularity contests. I don’t think you’re going to achieve a “true” result no matter what you do, it’s the nature of the beast.
I sent an email to the 200+ people I work with and had great numbers. Now its less than half. I guess we will be taking one for the team here.
R&tR, you shouldn’t have been lumped in with the filks anyway.
Thats why I didnt send emails to anyone I knew could cause troubles,
Sure I work for a company with so many poeple, I could have had 800 votes from them, but since we all share the same IP, I figured to skip my co-workers and just ask some family members and friends instead
btw does anyone know when midnight takes place? I don’t know which state does it refers to, and some states have like 3 hours difference….
So can anyone give the time in GMT?
-5 GMT.
This is where things get fickle with competition in music – it’s sooo difficult to come up with fair ways of judging. I’ve run and entered several ‘battle of the bands’ competitions – there’s always problems, it’s unavoidable. I hit up a few people for votes here, but at the end of the day they weren’t really voting for my song over the other songs in the competition, they were just voting for me because I asked them to. On the flip side, it does open up a whole bunch of people who would not have even seen this page to pop in and have a look.
At the end of the day, I didn’t enter this competition to ‘win’ it per se, moreover to have some creative expression about the show I love. And given the lack of complaints overall by the entrants to this post by Chris, I think most of us are in that category.
So hopefully Chris you’re not discouraged by this situation? – because I reckon there’s plenty of us are keen to have another scenario to get creative about and do it all again. Personally, I reckon it would be cool to do this several times through the year, and word would get out with more and more muso fans of the show. I assume you could keep all the songs up on imeem for as long as you like? – could get a whole collection of music from fans of all kinds of topics associated around Firefly / Serenity, how cool would that be!
Here, here! It’s about the fun, not the contest.
Reviewing how certain numbers always jumped up after another was drawing close, it was quite clear that someone was multiple voting. Given that the numbers are already compromised, I’d rather see a comittee work the winner out.
In any case, can I – as someone who has not submitted a song or anything – suggest that the original songs get an extra section to the filks? I think that creating a song from scratch – and recording it like those people have! – must be a lot more work than just adapting the lyrics of an existing song.
Harridan
All I can say is, I asked EVERYONE i know to vote, after a few numbers began to jump a little too fast for my reasoning (I did have the lead from the start of the voting before that)
So there may have been cheating, but not from my end (I even didnt get everyone at work voting for me because we share the IP address and didnt want it to seem un-kosher) so my numbers were gained by fair methods
If it helps? half of them were asking my what this firefly thing was, a few even asked to see it, so it worked out nicely
Personaly, what I really wanted to win, was the knowlege miss Hendricks liked my songs… that she may have picked it above all others… now t-h-a-t
would be cool 🙂
ps… what did you guys think about the song I didnt enter? (down at http://www.bashinginminds.com/2007/05/31/sing-a-song-of-saffron-and-win-stuff/
in my very long reply)
oops I ment “asked me”