33 Comments Add your own

• 1. hokumboy  |  July 31st, 2008 at 12:28 pm

  I’m still voting for Amanda!
  The “eligible” contestants are just geeky. Amadana, godbless her, is delightfully weird and has some genuine imagination.
  But, those attributes never seem to count for as much as they truly should.

• 2. hokumboy  |  July 31st, 2008 at 12:30 pm

  OOOPS!
  Sorry I mis-spelled you name in the previous post, AMANDA.

• 3. Georgette Braun  |  July 31st, 2008 at 12:35 pm

  hokumboy: rules get in the way sometimes, don’t they?

• 4. hokumboy  |  July 31st, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  Or, It could just be that mediocrity continues to reign supreme in Rockford.

• 5. Amanda Cannon  |  July 31st, 2008 at 2:17 pm

  holy cow i’ve got a fan…

  crap i just spilled water on my phone.

  but thanks hokumboy! =D

• 6. mike  |  July 31st, 2008 at 7:56 pm

  If rules got in the way, wouldn’t the first two contestents get disqualified also concidering they broke the “100 words or less” rule? Just sayin…

• 7. hokumboy  |  August 1st, 2008 at 9:51 am

  I guess Georgette gets a bit selective with her rules.
  Is she originally from Florida?

  My vote’s still with Amanda!

• 8. Allison Tarzian  |  August 1st, 2008 at 12:07 pm

  I love my RAY~RAY!!!!! I saw the paper yesterday and started bouncing and squealing. I’m so proud of how weird she is and always will be.

• 9. ElephantDave  |  August 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 am

  I know Jacob\’s dad. He is much weirder than Weird Al. And much more so than Jacob has told.

• 10. rivereyes12  |  August 2nd, 2008 at 6:34 pm

  parodies? those are original right? Jakes dad is weird all right

• 11. Saila  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 am

  I can’t believe it! Jacob Olson is using a bot! AND I CAN PROVE IT! This started out as a contest where you are supposed to vote for who is the weirdest. That’s great. You’re also allowed to vote as many times as you want. Sure, that’s fine. However Jacob is using BOTTING which is not okay, it is a form of cheating.

  I was told by a friend earlier that we could vote as many times as we wanted for who we wanted to win. But she said every time she voted Jacob’s votes went up too. I thought, hey, maybe someone else is just voting the same time she is. But she said she waited and when she didn’t vote (and just checked the results) the count for his didn’t go up. Every time she voted, within a minute or so every vote she made for Avid went into Jacob’s votes too!

  I’m sure you all know about botting, but just incase you don’t here are are the basics. A bot is a program that automatically does things that a person would do, such as auto refresh a page or enter information. In this case Jacobs bot checks this web page and every time Avid gets a vote (Possibly Stephanie too, I’m not sure, I didn’t vote for her.) the program fills in the first radio button and gives him a vote too. It can also be set up so that it votes for Jacob every fifteen minutes or so, spacing it out so as not to arise suspicion. The webmaster may be able to tell if all the votes are coming from the same IP address, but honestly that doesn’t matter as Proxies are easy to use and could give each vote a different (fake) IP address.

  So even if EVERYONE IN ROCKFORD voted for Avid, the bot program would count all of the votes for her as a vote for him too.

  THAT IS WRONG! THAT IS DIRTY! THAT IS CHEATING!

  If he lagitimately was winning I’d be okay with that, but up until seven this morning Avid was lagitimately winning and then within six hours over four hundred votes were made AND the botting program was enabled. I want to vote for my best friend, not Jacob! He’s stealing my votes! And he’s cheating. That is wrong. Especially if he gets rewarded for cheating! Really, I think Avid put a heck of a lot more work in to her entry, and lagitimately would have probably won. But now she doesn’t have a chance, even if all of her friends vote for her because the code on the site has been comprimized!

  If you don’t believe me then just try it yourself. Hit the view results button. Write down the number of votes for everyone. Now, vote ten or so times for Avid. Wait about a minute for the bot to catch up to you and view the results again. Every vote you made for Avid will now be also given to Jacob.

  I’m doing this around midnight, and I’m fairly certain that there aren’t that many people awake much less voting on the site. If I do nothing, the scores don’t change. When I vote, within a minute his vote tally goes up too, a sure sign of a bot!

  I think Jacob should be disqualified for unsportsmanlike conduct

• 12. dwight  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 4:01 am

  i voted for rachels story about weird al
  i thought she did a good job ……

• 13. dwight  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 am

  i liked rachels weird al story
  cause it was a very good story
  and it was very funny
  and i am very proud of her
  so she deserves to go to the weird al concert …..

• 14. Anna Voelker  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 7:11 am

  Saila: This is not a scientific contest. And we tell readers to vote as often as they like. 1,000 votes (as it stands right now) for Jacob is not out of line. We had around 50,000 votes cast on this blog when we did the Dancing with the Divas poll.

  Anna Voelker, online news editor, rrstar.com

• 15. Becky  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 am

  If this is voted upon Presentation, RACHEL is the winner hands down, she put time and effort into the entry which is very weird of course. If you kenw her you would know the way she is ever so kind and wouldn\’t cheat on a contest. I hope the person that did the box stuffing can live with themselves. Just watch out, she is the one who will become the shining star to every one who knows her and encounters her in life. not just a contest. Georgette, you have truly run across a diamond in the rough.

• 16. ElephantDave  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 9:33 am

  Saila: Falsely accusing Jacob of using a BOT has insipred me to even more vigorously vote for him. You are not the only person that is up at night or early in the AM. Others can and are online the same time as you and voting at the same time. That does not mean a bot is in use. Just because your best friend isn\’t winning does not mean others are cheating. What about Avid going over 100 word\’s? No complaints from you for that.

• 17. yoda2nd  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 am

  From a quick glance at the code and a little research on the Wordpress plugin they are using called Democracy, it is obvious that they have disabled IP logging. Which allows for people to stack the votes. Quite honestly this is rather unfair and unusual, as most internet polls and contests do not allow this.

• 18. Saila  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 am

  Avid met the 100 word guideline. Geo wrote her back AFTERWARD and asked her for more information. So her first submission followed the rules.

  You honestly expect me to believe that one of you is waiting me to vote and then they vote the same amount of times for him? If it was a human then the numbers would keep rising. But because it is a bot then they only rise when I make a vote for Avid (and possibly incrementally when he has that set up.)

  So yes, I am now 100% convinced he is using a bot to cheat just because he knows he cannot lagitimately win.

• 19. Saila  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 am

  There is something very wrong with your poll Geo, whenever I vote for Avid instead of giving her one like it should it gives her three votes AND gives Jacob four votes. It wasn\’t doing this last night.

• 20. Double-t  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm

  saila, Back off of Jacob, he is just a kid and just because you come up with this excuse doesnt mean people will feel sorry for your friend Amanda, so she wont be taking you to meet al,GET OVER IT YOU GUYS LOSE!

• 21. Amber  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm

  It looks to me like there is definitely some issues with the poll coding. Now I know for a fact that I’ve voted multiple times because Avid is a very good friend of mine and I wanted her to have all the happiness in the world. When I voted maybe half a dozen times Sat. morning before going to work, she was legitimately in the lead by 7 votes. Happy that I had helped her out, I came back around 9 hours later to see her competition’s score skyrocket to an amazing 1000+ votes. Finding this a little unfair I did my level best to vote more to help even out the difference only to notice that as I was voting her competitions votes went up as well. Not exactly the result I expected. Also when I had a period of inactivity, so as well did her competition.

  Hoping to perhaps bring more help in the way of friends I e-mailed some of our friends asking them to vote for her, to help and aid her in her quest to gain backstage passes. One of my more computer savvy friends noticed the peculiarities in the poll scoring as well, and with many of us voting for avid, it still seems that not only has Jacob’s score gone up beyond the realm of most human capabilities, but it has done so in a manner and time frame that really defies most conventional explanations. If you ask my personal opinion I don’t think it’s a bot anymore (that of course being my first conclusion). It appears more likely that the site code itself has been tampered with. If that is the case I would urge the paper itself to investigate the issue and make proper inquires in order to at least keep the spirit of the competition fair. If there is a legitimate reasoning for his scores to have increased so drastically (though I cast serious doubts upon this matter knowing how few people generally visit such polls) then so be it, but if a form of cheating really has been implemented then I do seriously hope that the paper will have the foresight to take appropriate actions.

• 22. yoda2nd  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 1:09 pm

  Just by looking at the results over the last 5 minutes, Jacob has gained 1800 votes. That works out to 6 votes per second. The best rate I could achieve by actually voting through the web page was about once every 30 seconds. Using those numbers, Jacob would need 180 people voting 2 times a minute for 5 minutes to achieve those kinds of results. I find those numbers slightly unrealistic, especially since he has gained over 8000 votes since it posted my first comment at 10am. It is pretty obvious he is using a bot.

• 23. ElephantDave  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 1:14 pm

  Jacob is NOT using a bot. Jacob doesn’t have internet. Nobody is using a bot whatever that is. But he does have a very large extended family with computers that got pissed off when he was unjustly accused of cheating. Reap what you sow.

• 24. yoda2nd  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 2:26 pm

  Given the numbers, that must be a VERY large extended family indeed.

• 25. Amanda  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 2:50 pm

  holy freakin crap guys, is there always controversy over polls?

  so there’s a possible “bot” scandal, im pretty sure georgette knows or can find out if its true or not. It is her column ya kno…

  as for the fighting, um.. whats the point in yelling at each other? Your lives wont change any no matter what you say. Its a little weird al contest, not the end of the world =)

• 26. Becky  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm

  amazing how Rachel had 250 votes this morning, now she has 750 today, and jacobs has 3X the quantity that I he had before I left the on line this morning, It is a pity that people can’t play fair, do you realize the entire population of Rockford IL is 150,000 he is 20,000 shy of hitting the population, oh by the way, when I tried it at 7:50 AM I gave the great AVID LEBON a vote, and ‘ol jason got three, I don’t think very many people are up at that time on a SUNDAY morning. I think possibly doing something like breaking into a computer and using a bot like that is illegal and punishable by jail time, isn’t it? I hope Georgia sees through the scandal of this whole thing, thank goodness Rachels’ friends are geeks and knows their sh**

• 27. yoda2nd  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm

  Becky, actually it is closer 17x times of Rachel’s votes.

• 28. dwight  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 5:23 pm

  hi georgette
  i think rachel should win to see weird al
  cause i voted for her story
  its really funny
  and silly
  so she deserves it …….

• 29. Ruth Stringham  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 pm

  way ti go Rach!

• 30. bunnyboi  |  August 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 pm

  @ElephantDave well by those numbers it really does look like a bot is being used don’t ya think?

• 31. dwight  |  August 4th, 2008 at 12:36 am

  rachel is gonna win i can feel it

• 32. ElephantDave  |  August 4th, 2008 at 7:20 am

  Saila/Becky/Yoda2nd/Dwight/Amber: Multiple computers & people willing to spend time to help someone is all it takes. We worked thru the day & night to get the count we have. It is too bad you really would rather whine instead of putting effort into it.

• 33. hokumboy  |  August 4th, 2008 at 10:03 am

  Well,
  I go away for the weekend and come back to this?
  It seems Georgette has organized the proverbial “3 Car Funeral”.

  Kids, have fun voting!
  And folks, just be glad the RRStar didn’t charge you a buck a vote for their Newspapers in Education diddle as they usually do.

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