How Much Of A Rebel Are You? by Suasor

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

How Much Of A Rebel Are You?

POSTED BY: SUASOR
UPDATED: Monday, May 25, 2009 07:22
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Monday, May 25, 2009 7:22 AM

The first three weeks of May saw some insane voting at TVTally.com, to determine the most popular TV series. Mainly it's between Firefly and Jericho fans. In those three weeks, over 60,000 votes were cast just for those two shows. Slightly more votes were cast by Browncoats, as we went from 1,520 votes behind Jericho, to 434 votes behind. Currently, votes are being cast at more than thirty times the rate of four months ago.

Now where did all those additional votes come from? Most of them came from fans who had access to multiple IP addresses. Every PC connected to the Internet has a unique IP address. Most voting systems keep track of the IP address of voters, and limit the votes from that address. There are several ways you can work this system. We've all heard of people with access to an office full of PCs with different IP addresses, going around and voting several times. Those still using dial-up get a new IP address each time they log on. So do many broadband users. But the most common method of inflating your voting power is to use a free proxy server. These services provide a way for people to surf the web without revealing their IP address (which can be used to track down who you are).
Go to a site like www.tech-faq.com/proxy.shtml and click on one of the proxy sites listed there. When the site loads, enter www.tvtally.com/shows/weeklytop.php?top=10 and vote. You'll probably find that your votes won't take via many of these proxy sites. That's because some Jericho or Firefly fan has already used that proxy site in the past six hours. When you do find a proxy site you can vote via, bookmark it. Continue for as long as you can manage until you have a bunch of proxy IP addresses you can use every six hours to vote a lot. Using this technique is time consuming, but it can, and has, pumped up the vote.

There are some illegal ways to pump up the vote (using botnets and such), but I'm not even going to discuss those. I don't believe anyone is using botnets or hacking to increase the vote. No, most of it appears to be good old fashioned gathering of multiple IP addresses using legal methods.

If you turn off cookies on your browser, when you go to TVTally, you can vote up to three (used to be six) times (and for more than one show, or all for one show). You can also vote more than once in six hours (unpredictable, tends to happen early in the day, and after 6 PM). Some consider this cheating, some don't. Either you're a cookie monster, or you ain't.

To see the current standings (and vote) go to http://www.tvtally.com/shows/overalltop.php?top=25

For daily updates on the voting, check the Vote For Firefly thread (which is almost always being bumped so that it stays on the main pate.)

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