Hi Guys

We received an email from bulldozer100 stating that he did not cast the votes listed by our new 'Detailed Stats' section. This is exactly why we created the stats page, as you guys can help us spot any strange/malicious votes.

We have since removed bulldozer100's votes for February and have recalculated the averages for this month.

We also looked into 4play's voting pattern. At this stage we do not think foul play is at work here for the following reasons:

a) There is a consistent credit card transaction history (ever since 2006) for 4play

b) He voted for 32 girls - lots of 5's and lots of 1's. In other words he isn't downvoting all the time. It seems like he has lots of favourites, and lots of advertisers he doesn't like - and he is using the rating system to voice his opinion. This was what the system was built for.

I will however investigate his votes further to see if he favours advertisers from a specific ESA rep. (ie, some ESA Rep makes buddies with a punter, then asks him to vote only his girls up). Will get back to you on that.

Lastly, from now on we only allow votes from members with recent credit card transactions. This means no girls can vote for each other, no ESA rep can cast votes on the free accounts they received. The Top 10 is for punters and punters alone. I must apologise for the delay in this.

Otherwise please post in this thread if you spot potential malicious votes.

Regards

James

What about members like me that pays via eft and not credit cards?

Yeah James, u discriminating again, activate eft's as well.

Sorry guys

It is not our intention to discriminate against anyone. In an ideal world I would have allowed EVERYONE to vote, free members included. But in the last 3 months we learned 1 lesson - if we leave a tiny little gap open somewhere - someone IS going to abuse it.

Curt, dave01 - I'm working on a solution to include you guys - but at this stage the solution we have is the quickest and easiest to implement. The main reason why the credit card transactions is so easy to code, is because it is handled by a 3rd party company. That immediately closes many open gaps - first of all the girls cannot vote. People who are friends with ESA staff (who received free accounts) cannot vote. The sms system cannot be abused. ESA staff cannot be tempted to create lots of free gold memberships for the sole purpose of casting malicious votes.

Guys please keep in mind that we are trying to achieve something here that has not been done in SA before - we want to be the de facto standard on all ratings for advertisers in the industry. Nobody has that. And it should be YOUR votes.

So we have 1 of 2 choices.

Choice 1: Leave some loopholes in the system, it gets abused, and basically renders the top 10 useless for everyone.

Choice 2: Base the system on something external. At this stage the only 'external' control point I have is the credit card transactions. Not ideal in any way - I fully agree - but at least I can offer you the peace of mind that everything is being done to ensure that the votes are very close to legit.

I am working on other solutions - based on a suggestion PunterSThompson made a while back on this exact topic. The only reason why I haven't implemented this is because I'm busy rewriting the ENTIRE ESA in a brand new coding framework. Any work I do now on this website will be lost in a month's time, when I switch over the entire website to the new faster framework. Once again this is why I chose a 'quick and easy' solution for the top 10.

To all the EFT guys, please hang on a while - the better solution is on it's way.

Regards

James

Hi James, I must trouble you to provide us with an update if you please -I am still unable to vote .