JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum So Where Does Your Song Rank On Ourstage?

It would be silly to tell people not to vote on their own songs. The cheaters would simply log in as someone else, so the honest people would be faced with becoming cheaters or being punished for being honest. Instead, let everyone vote on themselves. If the system is built to prevent (or at least significantly decrease the value in) cheating, it shouldn't be relevent. That said, I know there are people on there voting day and night all month long. I was one of them for about 10 days while I waited for our own awards database to become available and found myself with the very unusual dead time to do so. I voted in over 5000 matches and got every single song dozens of times if not more in the category I was voting on. I had every song notated so I knew where I ranked each by the end. (Of course my rankings had almost zero to do with the end result once Bergeron and the other cheaters got done). BUT.. by doing so, I learned about a lot of other artists and some were JPF members that I didn't know or hadn't met before. I have to think there are many artists, especially who aren't gigging or don't have families to deal with, that are voting constantly (honestly or otherwise). Why punish the honest people?

As for you voting against yourself Al, I am not naive enough to think that most people, when no one is watching, are actually voting against their own song. Everyone can SAY they are.. but I've been doing this long enough and have known too many artists to think that would be the normal behavior regardless of what song is better. If you build the site knowing that artists will vote for themselves and still keeping it fair, I think you're far better off. And if you don't have time to invest in voting at all, then it's your loss, but a fair one since those that do help keep the site going. If you removed all the voting done by people using the site for their own songs, I bet you'd lose the majority of all votes at this point. That's just the real world. But I know a lot of folks who vote in channels they have no songs in, and that is valuable input into the system. In our own awards, we don't let people vote in their own categories, but we also don't have 50K people voting on thousands of songs. When we open the flood gates in the final round, we very carefully control what genres people access and vote in and we watch closely for irregularities (which we've found and fixed in the past). Ourstage can't possibly do that. So they have to build the system with reality, and not pure honesty, in mind. In my opinion, I think they underestimated the lengths people would go to try and cheat. The reality is that people can be evil and selfish and obnoxious and until you've dealt with them one a wide basis as those of us who do so with large communities that we interact with over a long period of time, you just can't understand it to the level it happens. I think they are learning a few hard lessons quickly and it appears that in most cases, they are adapting to these lessons where possible. Staying ahead of dishonest people isn't easy sad to say. That's why there will always be crime in the world no matter what efforts society makes to keep it in check. Best, in my opinion, to accept certain global truths (such as artists voting for themselves) than to punish only the honest.

Brian