On March 23 2011 02:47 avilo wrote:
yeah...i may be making a blog post about this later because it's pretty much garbage what they are doing. I'll just say here that as far as xeris has told me so far, they removed me from the voting site (and worse) because they somehow think I personally cheated the voting system.
So the word is so far, because of their own faulty system that anyone on the internet can troll, they are personally holding me responsible, saying I hacked/cheated for fraudulent votes on a site that I have no control over.
I'll probably make a post about it later on TL if they continue to refuse to clear it up with me. Pretty unprofessional on their part, and I sincerely hope they don't treat all potential players like this.
yeah...i may be making a blog post about this later because it's pretty much garbage what they are doing. I'll just say here that as far as xeris has told me so far, they removed me from the voting site (and worse) because they somehow think I personally cheated the voting system.
So the word is so far, because of their own faulty system that anyone on the internet can troll, they are personally holding me responsible, saying I hacked/cheated for fraudulent votes on a site that I have no control over.
I'll probably make a post about it later on TL if they continue to refuse to clear it up with me. Pretty unprofessional on their part, and I sincerely hope they don't treat all potential players like this.
We asked uservoice to investigate fraudulent votes for everyone on the first page of the poll. All the fraudulent votes were removed by uservoice. Below is the official emails exchanged between us and uservoice (protecting the email addresses).
We've removed all the fraudulent votes for "avilo" which was pretty much all of them.
(NAME WITHHELD)
CEO, UserVoice.com
On March 19, 2011 at 07:20AM NASL <-------> wrote:
Yes please. And anyone else on the 1st page who
Has the same issue
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Begin forwarded message:
From: Daniel <support@uservoice.com>
Date: March 18, 2011 3:09:03 PM PDT
To: ------
Subject: Re: Poll being hacked
~~~ Reply above this line ~~~
Hi Russell,
You are right, we just check some more, and it looks like over 20k of the votes he got were from the same user agent. Unfortunately, he was smart about not using the same IP, so they slipped through our primary filters. Would you like to have us clear all the fraudulent votes?
Let us know if there is anything else we can help with.
Best,
Daniel
To clarify: We are not accusing Avilo of cheating. It could have been him rigging the votes on the poll, or it could have been someone else rigging the votes on the poll. Either way, all the fake votes were removed, and the remaining, legitimate votes are... 43. So, Avilo was not removed from the poll, but his fake votes were.
We cannot have someone high up on the poll who received most of them illegally, regardless of whether or not he knew it was happening. The poll obviously doesn't determine who is in the league, but it did factor into our decisions.
Next, because Avilo is insistent on claiming that we are accusing him of cheating, here are the emails I sent to him and the PM's I sent. Nowhere did I say that I accused him of cheating. In the FIRST PM I said "you", but I clarified it later.
PMs:
"Ah, you were removed from the poll by uservoice. We investigated fraudulent voting and your votes were illegitimate. You used the same account but changed IP's every time, which was pretty funny. "
"Nobody has anything against you, none of us here have ever dealt with you or know you at all. The CEO of uservoice told me that almost all of your votes were fraudulent, and that they were also almost all made from one account. So, am I believing you or the CEO of uservoice? "
"I don't know who the CEO of uservoice is either, but we investigated fraudulent votes of every player in the first page of the poll, and almost all of yours were found to be fraudulent. Dunno what else to tell you. "
"What I said was that you used the same account for your votes, whether it was you specifically or someone doing it for you, I don't know, I guess there's really no way to tell if it was you or someone trolling you. Either way, almost all of the votes to your name weren't legitimate.
The polling doesn't matter, but someone trying to cheat the system does matter. Stealing a $1 candy bar doesn't make a huge difference, but if I actually did that it would make a difference because stealing is bad. So your analogy that even if you cheated it shouldn't matter because the poll doesn't matter is wrong.
So, whether it was you, or someone randomly deciding to rig the poll to give you 23,000 votes or however many you had -- we can't tell. All we know is that the votes you received were fraudulent. So we can't in good conscience keep you on a list to be considered knowing that you possibly rigged the voting; does that make sense?"
Emails:
"Well,
uservoice investigated all of the people on the first page of the poll for fraudulent voting. There is an automatic filter that deletes votes with the same IP. There is a secondary layer that detects other fraud. Almost all of Avilo's votes were found to be fraudulent. It was the same account changing IP's and continuously voting for him. Did Avilo do it? I guess there's really no way to know for sure. It could have been someone else doing it for him (for some reason).
But the point is, almost the entirety of his votes were fraudulent. Uservoice is a pretty respected polling service that prides itself on its fraud detection. That's why we chose to use them, and why we paid for their service. I don't doubt that they're wrong. Since there's no way to tell WHO actually did the votes, it's basically Avilo's word that he didn't versus uservoice's evidence that all his votes were rigged. So, in good conscience it was the decision of the owners of the NASL that he can't be included in a standby list because it might jeapordize our integrity. The reason Avilo was first on our standby list was because of his perceived popularity. Obviously that has now been shown to be false, so we can no longer have him on that list. "
"I'm not trying to bar you from anything, all I have is the evidence presented. We might not even need a standby, so this entire discussion can be moot. Your votes were illegitimate. For whatever the reason, since there's no reason for us to determine it aside from you saying "I didn't cheat" ... we can't have you on that list. It was a call made by the owners, it has nothing to do with trying to bar you from the league. "
---
To clarify. Avilo was on a standby list (not one of the 50 players), in case some people didn't get their deposits on time or dropped out for whatever reason. The entire reason for him being on that list was his position in the poll. Since all his votes were illegal, we removed him from our standby list. This has less to do with the fact that his votes were illegal than it does the fact that he only has a small number of legitimate votes, so the entire reason for him being on our standby list is now null and void.
Once again: we are not accusing him of cheating. There is NO WAY for us to know exactly who gave him 23,000 votes, but they were fraudulent votes.
This is the last thing we will say on the matter, and we believe that our decision was fair and correct.