Two hours ago, Vesom Sechel was in the lead for Best Torah Blog in the Jewish-Israeli Blog Award (JIB) Finals, with over 170 votes.
Moments ago, the number of votes to its credit was drastically reduced, leaving only 83. Vesom Sechel suddenly fell into a distant and rather precarious Second Place position.
I suspect that the process of vote-authentication being employed by the JIBs staff is far from objective, and that this caused Vesom Sechel to lose many of the votes it had rightfully earned.
Please make sure to cast your ballot if you haven’t already!
I just emailed you the vote log for your blog. If your review shows a different result than ours, I’d be interested in hearing it.
I think you’ll find there was a clear attack on your vote. This is NOT an accusation against you, rather either some overenthusiastic reader or someone who’s just out to damage the JIBs.
For some reason I haven’t received your email yet, but I’m sure it will come through eventually.
As I said, I do know many families in which more than one member probably voted for me from the same IP address, as well as some people who work at the same businesses who almost certainly did the same. It seems unfair to toss out their votes based upon circumstantial evidence. Isn’t every individual entitled to a vote?
Log is sent from my gmail account. Check to make sure it didn’t get caught in your spam filter.
As you should see see from the log, almost all of what I counted was from 1 source. In our not-published fraud tracking report, this is what I wrote:
“NONE OF THESE are indictments of the Blog or Blog Author, G-d forbid! We don’t know who did this, and have no reason to associate this activity with the blogger. Rather, it’s probably someone who really likes the blog (running up it’s votes), really dislikes the blog (trying to get it disqualified), or wants to destroy the JIBs (because they don’t like it.)
Also, we could be wrong. Sometimes we could be seeing a group of actual people from the same synagogue, neighborhood, workplace or town voting together (in the same brief period of time) for their friend or member. Unfortunately, given hacking attempts in this years JIBs, we are erring on the side of assumed cheating.”
Being we are holding this same standard across the board, it should have equal impact for the “same from work” or same from family.
Once you see the log, please let me know your thoughts.
Did you receive the log? What is your evaluation, with the data in hand? Are we being fair, or not?
I didn’t receive the log. I have been having problems with my email lately and I finally got to the bottom of it – instead of consigning things to the Bulk Folder, my account was set to erase them immediately. So that’s probably what happened to your email.
I have since adjusted my email settings so this won’t happen again. Would you mind resending the log? Thanks.
Resent. Awaiting your opinion.