animalkingdom said on December 18, 2004 09:53:

Umm...By the way, why weren’t the live songs included??? It was about the Tourism “ALBUM” wasn’t it - not only some of the Tourism Songs??

What’s a real misery now is that I don’t see IMHBL there! That wasn’t live entirely! It was a 5-minute-long studio recording for god’s sake!!! :/

Rich-UK said on December 18, 2004 10:48:

CHEATING UNCOVERED...

I’ve had confirmation from Visa and Thomas that in the final round “Candy_Says, Melana and Philip747 all came from the same IP. Also, Noesis and RoxetteRulz2004 both came from the same IP (different from the rest of the bunch), but it looked liked it was the same ISP”, and confirmation from Roxhard that the person “Philip747, Candy Says, Noesis have been voting since Round 4/Round 5”.

In summary, it is highly likely that 1 person voted 5 times under 5 different usernames to dishonestly prejudice the outcome of the final, and has also been voting 3 times in previous rounds. Pathetic.

Therefore even with just 4 of these 5 votes disqualified, The Rain comprehensively won the final with 19.6 votes to Silver Blue’s 12.4 votes.

I’ve enjoyed the Tourism Survivor Poll and would love to see similar contests for CBB, HAND, RS, and some hits ones (in whatever format). However, I do think that this cheating should be discouraged. Although I could be accused of taking this too seriously, there’s little point in TDR members voting in a poll that can be decided by 1 person. Therefore as a suggestion, maybe future votes could be collected only from members with > 10 SmallTalk posts. Of course this does not eliminate the possibility of someone voting more than once, and is a little unfair against those who wish to join TDR to vote, but it does proactively try to circumvent the problem of a person creating different usernames simply to cheat in a poll. Just an idea...

Thanks Roxhard for resurrecting the contests. All the best, Rich

Roxette-atic said on December 18, 2004 12:35:

I think the right song won. “The Rain” is the best from “Tourism”. However , I never understood how you could vote out “How Do You Do!” so early, and how you could keep “Here Comes The Weekend” for so long..

RoxHard said on December 18, 2004 20:34:

@ AnimalKingdom. I didn’t think it was fair to include some songs on 2 totally different polls. Yes, they are different from the studio versions, but not THAT much. This poll was primarily conceived to find out which was the best TOURISM song, and I didn’t think it was right to take up more time with songs that already had a chance in the Joyride and Look Sharp! polls. But, hej... if you wanna make a Tourism poll with all 16 songs included, go ahead. ;-)

@ Rich-UK. I’m just sorry that I didn’t catch these phony usernames out beforehand! But, like I said before... I have been keeping records of how everyone voted since Round 2, and I can see the usernames “Philip747” and “Candy Says” voted in Round 2, with “Noesis” and “RoxetteRulz2004” following in Round 7. I think it’s pathetic that someone tried to manipulate this poll, but, like I said before, this person didn’t actually achieve much... there was no clear-cut case of these 4-5 pseudo-users actually getting rid of the song they wanted to. They usually voted in rounds when a lot of people voted for the same song they did (like Fingertips in Round 9, and the round when Queen Of Rain was eliminated).

I’ll be sure to check suspecious user-accounts in the future polls, which will take place early 2005 - no time now :(