Blarch Badness: VOTE in Ballard Regional Final
And it’s official — this bracket is busted beyond all recognition. West Seattle keeps bringing the upsets, short-circuiting Electrolicious, while the usr/bin/girl robots stuff a sock in BlatherWatch. And now, the thrilling conclusion.
BALLARD REGIONAL
Regional Finals
February 22
#7 #!/usr/bin/girl vs #8 West Seattle Blog
And what’s remarkable is that for all the bellyaching about the “Ballard Regional” the West Seattleites are now just one vote away from the Final Four. But now, can the flannel-wearing, Admiral movie watching, Spud eating insurgency prevail over an anime army? The suspense is… no, that’s not a “killing me” feeling. I think that’s a kidney stone.
UPDATE:
Dpolls apparently has given up the ghost. I’m not exactly sure who was leading at the time the poll stopped worked. In fact, WSB thinks /usr/bin/girl was winning and vice versa. So, at least this is easy.
Here’s a new poll. Cross your fingers that PollDaddy isn’t floating in the virtual fishtank tomorrow. Two things:
1. I’m extending the deadline one day — to Thursday. It will now close at the same time the U District closes. Hopefully.
2. To maintain the “vote once-per-day” attitude I elected to NOT cookie-lock the poll. That means you can vote as many times as you like. HOWEVER… since this will run three more days I ask you to please keep it to three votes per person. In fact, if I see clear evidence that someone’s been flooding the poll, I’ll kill it and we’ll draw a name from a hat. Got it? Be polite in your ballot box stuffing, please.
UPDATE #2:
What did I say up there? That if you start flooding it I’ll be pissy? Well, someone did. So, I blew away the results, and it’s now cookie-locked. Please act like grownups, OK? It’s just a stupid poll.
Take Our Poll from PollDaddy.com
Voting is still open in the second round of theU District regional, and also in the West Seattle and Capitol Hill regional finals. Tomorrow, on to the U District for the last of the regionals.
Tough to vote, when that option isn’t given…
Tough to vote, when that option isn’t given…
I want to vote for westseattleblog.com because it’s an awesome site!
/usr/bin/girl is fixing the vote! The blog suspiciously picked up close to a hundred votes in under an hour!
funny, we just came here to point out the same thing that “anonymous” just noted. we checked “our” results at 8-something pm and we were one vote ahead of u/b/g. now an hour later we are 100 votes behind. and she hasn’t even mentioned it on her blog in days. our readers are asleep by now so it’s gonna be tough to catch up. dylan, please keep your promise to check for boxstuffing. we’re being good.
I’m looking at it right now. I think you’re right, though I haven’t checked it in a few hours (when there were 800 votes).
So, ball’s in your court. I can blow away the current numbers and cookie-lock the voting, so you’ll have 24 hours to round as many unique voters as you can.
Or, I’ll grab another Metblogger and we’ll flip a coin tomorrow to decide the winner.
Your choice.
I think it’s unfortunate that someone tried to fix the election. I vote that we scratch the results and go to a cookie-locked system.
OK, I’m tired of trying to figure this out. I’ve blown away the current voted totals since I can’t find a source for them. You ask people nicely to play by the rules, but nooooooo….
So, one vote, one person, one day. It’s been a 50/50 race so far, anyway.
Can’t speak for others, but the vote was pretty close until earlier today…could be a rabid u/b/g fan, or a clever WSB supporter trying to reset the vote, no idea.
Zannah may not have posted anything new since the 22nd, but people have been making comments on that particular post everyday regarding the score. As far as I know (myself being one of them), we’ve been keeping to the “3 votes per person” as requested. However, I have no way of tracking the online voters and learning their identities.
If you do, please feel free to use it.
I declare Shenannigans! There was a time during the original dpolls poll where Zannah was in the lead 70/30 and it dropped to 50/50 in under 2 hours. Coincidence? And then now this. If there was overstuffing, I bet it wasn’t a /u/b/g supproter at all… WSB may not be directly responsible, but the moral compass is not pointing to true north! It’s descpicable. I for one will not support this banana republic or recognize its authority.
when i went to bed after midnight, u/b/g was slightly ahead and now the vote has been restarted for a third time. how lame is that.
when i went to bed after midnight, u/b/g was slightly ahead and now the vote has been restarted for a third time. how lame is that.
Concerned Citizen — WHY would a WSB supporter rig the original dpoll vote? The system was locked to a one-a-day vote and there was no chatter about overstuffing whatsoever. Your logic is faulty at best.
If anyone’s readers are overstuffing it’s clearly u/b/g. Who suspiciously gained over a hundred votes in under 60 minutes?! Who has the more tech saavy readership?! Please — even the blog’s name is technical sounding! While I think it’s great that someone clearly loves the u/b/g blog enough to rig the vote in the 11th hour–let’s all play fair and let the best blog win, okay?
As for the wsb blog–wsb supporters are not rigging the vote…there are just a lot of us who love the blog that much. It’s a great blog that’s informative, community-building, and well writeen. Stop trying to fan false flames.
Wow, this little poll starting to remind me of the Twilight Zone where the neighbors begin to shoot one another because the lights have gone out… =)
“Even the name is technical”?
That’s seriously the stupidest “proof” that someone cheated that I’ve ever heard.
OK, all of you, take a step back. This is a stupid poll. I will admit it’s just a stupid poll. And some of you are acting like we’re electing God or something.
Honestly, people.
They started it.
Do you want to go into timeout? I’ll put you in timeout.
The cheating clearly hasn’t stopped. As soon as one votes for one blog, a vote for the other blog occurs. Based on what my friends and I have witnessed, I think there is an automatic voting bot being implemented. Clearly no one is playing fair in this election. I urge Metroblogging Seattle to stop the madness and toss a coin.
If “cookie-lock” prevents ballot stuffing, why on earth did you unlock it (and ANNOUNCE you’d unlocked it) in the first place?
I’m just saying…
Voting bot software (which can duplicate random voting by ensuring the votes stay withing a certain margin until a prescheduled time) can easily bypass cookie restrictions. What’s more, if one wants to vote multiple times, all they need to do is clear their cookie cache or install a program that hides their IP. It’s not difficult to do if someone (*cough* a u/b/g fan *cough*) is desperate enough to win. Now the close 50/50 polls and sudden increase of votes in the 11th hour yesterday makes so much more sense.
Actually, I just spent 4 minutes reloading the “Poll Results”, and watched WSB go from 206 to 210, while u/b/g stayed static at 214, so I don’t know that all the conspiracy theories are grounded in facts.
I could give a frak about this but didn’t the same thing happen in #!/usr/bin/girls last election?
As I said, voting bots can be calibrated to keep a vote within a percentage (see blackbox.org’s website). Thus, the vote for Team X (with the bot) would hypothetically remain the same until the votes for Team Y reached a particular percentage above Team X (for the sake of argument–let’s say 3%). When that occurs, Team X’s bot would enable itself and start trailing the votes. Such bots can also be calibrated to vote a certain number of times each hour. The only reason we noticed it was because we got a group of people at SSCC’s computer lab to vote for WSB and several students pointing out the phenonmenon.
Cheatingsucks – you know a lot about ballot stuffing bots for someone who’s claiming that the other team is the one using them.
All of these accusatory statements don’t reflect well on the blogs that these negativity-mongers claim to support. Do any of the actual blogs (or good folk that run them) care about this vote anymore?
Oh Lord. I’m an educator. That means I use my mind and read up on a lot of topics. While I could be wrong about the election being rigged, I do find is curious that the poles have remained at 50/50 all week and downright sad that this fun election has turned so ugly.
Cheating Sucks, if you had actually been paying attention you’d have noticed that the “poles” [sic] have not stayed at 50/50 all week. There have been numerous situations where one party is ahead and the other quickly shoots past them. As an educator, you must value the use of facts and reliable data as the foundation for meaningful judgements, and I look forward to you backing up your claims in some tangible fashion in the future.
Or you could just continue to spout as you have, helping to engender the ugliness that you rail against, and [I think that's about enough of that --dw]
I’m closing the comments now. People are getting punchy.
FTR, I finally got the web stats from yesterday, and there were a couple of suspicious IP addresses that hit the site far more than anyone else. I’m not going to list the IPs or name names, but it’s clear there was some gaming yesterday.
In the words of poet, scholar, and kick-boxer Lloyd Dobler, “DUDE YOU MUST CHILL!”