Brain,
Everyone here agrees that those are sleazy tactics, but the job/challange that OurStage has is to program their sytem so it's virtually impossible to "bypass" their fair judging process and ranking system.

All kinds of scam, phishing and virus emails are outright sleazy and evil, yet these can be almost entirely eliminated with good computing practices and server measures. The weakest chain in the link will always be attacked first, and I'm sure OurStage is aware of this problem and continue to tweak their system to avoid all attemps (ranging from "Jr. High" to High-tech) to compromise their ranking process.

Here's another potential "hole" they might need to plug. A band of 4 guys could share the same band profile (login account), but then each could also register their own personal "fan" login account. So now all four (plus their managers & street teamers) could work as a team to bump up their song rankings in any given contest channel. As might be expected, they could vote on a "curve" against competing songs while giving their own songs the highest "By far" votes.

I don't think there's an easy way to plug this hole, but the best way is to have literally thousands of fans whose collective votes would way outnumber the attemps of any artist or band to "bump" their own songs. Only problem is that some bands might have a very loyal fan following, so it will be difficult to get them to vote for other competing artists or bands.

But all in all, OurStage is probalby still the best online voting alternative around, so we might as well use it and make the best of it! smile

Michael

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach

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