Just thought we'd clarify what's been happening these last few days. Basically, you might have noticed that we've taken down some of the links to the Hugo Cup. This is because the voting in the next few days will probably be reset, so there's little point right now asking our members and visitors to vote when they'll just have to start all over again soon.The reason why it is being reset is mostly to do with how easy it was to game the system and cheat with bots. There's little point arguing about if this was already occurring, but the fact that one could do it if they wished so effortlessly made the system a bad way to sort out such an important competition to so many Lost fans.
We chatted with Jay from Jay and Jack, along with DarkUFO and DocArzt at The Tail Section, and we all pretty much agreed about getting a captcha on the vote to make sure its always a human casting the votes. Of course, you can never be 100% free of foul play, but manual multi-voting will have a minimal affect on the outcome of the vote, whereas a bot can ensure victory (or more appropriately, loss) for some parties. When it was possible for us to create a script in minutes that could give Lostpedia 10,000 votes in less than a day, it was obvious something needed to be changed, and the fellow Lost sites we talked to kindly agreed that they didn't mind a rematch and understood our point of view.
And in fact, this new round might actually be better, as we could find a way to embed the vote frame on all five sites, meaning its only a one-click vote. That could make the total number of votes into the hundreds of thousands, which probably would make it the biggest Lost vote the Internet has ever seen.....
At any rate, when the new voting system is sorted, Lostpedia will be linking to it again once more, and hopefully we can then have a more secure contest, all in good fun still.
