[quintin3265]

While I agree with a lot of what Vile said, I disagree with the issue of public voting not being fair. The algorithm that's being used is not based upon the information mentioned here. I am very confident that who won which prizes in the previous competition was affected by cheating or attempted rigging of the results.

Public voting increased the amount of traffic to the site by a factor of 10. These weren't bots; these were visitors who were using real browsers and clicking between pages to download other songs. For example, amongst other filters, "people" who voted without passing a valid referring page were not counted in the results. I hate revealing these things here because then people can defeat them next time, but I feel I need to address people's concerns without giving too much away. It is true that many people voted for only one song, but I am confident that these were valid votes and that there was generally one vote per person.

While I don't want to impose my will on people, I think that it's in everyone's best interest to have as many people vote as possible. There are many other positive consequences to people voting: new people find out about the site and download songs that aren't related to the competition. Perhaps one of these people will be a music industry CEO.

KiddCabbage and I had a discussion and he mentioned how Dwelling of Duels requires registration for voting. While not as strict as DoD, what do people think about requiring registration without any time limit on creation? Such a system, while it seems simple to defeat, would cut down the number of casual "click 7" votes by 90%, even if no other changes were made to the voting process.

Alternatively, we could require people to vote on all entries, and to rank entries using the "toplists" idea we talked about in a previous thread. Now, I have more time, so I could create invisible voting lists that the voters are required to fill out, and every song must be listed on the list in order for their votes to count. If there are x entrants, the number of points given to each entrant would be x-p, where p is the position in the voter's list. Comments on this idea?

I understand your viewpoint, but I'm not hot on creating a judges panel. While it might be possible to get people who like different types of music, how could it possibly be fairly decided who, out of all the possible choices, is to be on the panel? And how could anyone interact with the panel members in the same way after they judged the results? Even if the judged competition runs flawlessly, that's how cliques form, and I believe that we should avoid the possibility of one being created at all costs.