Mar 20

4chan's Moot makes Time Magazine online poll Posted on Friday, March 20 2009

4chan's owner Moot made it to Time Magazine's top 100 online poll.

TL;DR

Moot was at the top, then knocked down, then at the top then knocked down, then waayy above everyone then time deleted like 900k votes and the shitstorm began.

Events

Yesterday morning (March 19 09) moot few up to 93% way over anyone else. John Stewart, Vladmir Putin, Steven Colbert and Ron Paul suddenly made competition and people started down voting moot. Thing were kept close until moot was winning by the end of the day, despite a brief vote surge making the view #1 for awhile. The next morning I checked he had a huge lead with 82%, everyone else in the top 20 had a 50 - 60% average rating. Suddenly people that previously had very few votes starting getting shot up and moot got down voted to 79%. They finally got shot down with moot taking a huge lead over everyone else with over 1.2 million votes. Suddenly moot dropped down to 250,000 votes with a rating of 50% with allegations that time is rigging the polls.

Time Magazine Probably didn't rig the poll

The methods, scripts and programs posted to upvote moot in most threads often didn't include the 'key' query string variable which is some kind of md5 dependent on the score. It looks like voting without the key variable doesn't work anymore even though it had before. They probably wiped out all the votes that didn't have a key or that had an incorrect key. In the mean time people are randomly speculating they wiped votes that were exactly 100 or 1. Changing the number to something random without updating the authentication key just causes the query to fail. There's also speculation you will be blocked for voting faster than every x seconds. It looks like it logs the votes and runs some kind of cron job every minute adding people who have voted too much to the blocked list. Within that span, you can vote as many times as you want. It also seems to have some kind of requirement, eg if the log has over 5000 votes flush it and check for repeats to block.

Time can't run a poll

I don't understand why they let people vote so many times for the same person to begin with. They may have the logic similar to: 'since there's 200 people on the list the same person should be able to vote at least 200 times', but it shouldn't work for flooding up votes on the same person. They should make it by unique IP or even trash the last octet to make it even better. Yes, there's a chance people with a dynamic IP get screwed but that makes for more accurate results. If newgrounds can do it right, why can't time magazine? Using GET instead of POST requests is stupid. Many of the vote flooders just use iframes. They can even load it into their personal sites and make their unsuspecting visitors vote loads of times.

There's plenty of people voting legitimately. I'm not implicating all of 4chan is botting him up. They'd probably be #1 if time used unique IPs anyway. There's been plenty of evidence there's some other group(s) trying to prevent moot from being #1 or at least auto-voting their favorite people.

Tags: moot 4chan time magazine, time magazine top moot, time magazine rigging online poll, top 100






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