Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Vote Fraud Solutions?
As we have discussed the vote fraud occuring in the blog post below (on ff at http://www.forexfactory.com/news.php?do=news&id=164795), the real concern is fixing this going forward. We should stay away from negative talk in this post and focus on a real solution. One company that was exploiting the system at least expressed a desire to stop it from occuring in the future. I submit this is about the most material piece of news available since it affects content delivery far into the future, in other words what content is given priority in getting delivered to site visitors. I think the better the system, the better the content prioritization will be, and the more forexfactory will flourish as the hub to visit for top news. I do have serious doubts about a voting system working at all, because it is so easy nowadays to control many accounts from many areas around the world. Therefore my first thought was a voting committee, but that is far from a well formed idea and could be open to similar abuse if not implemented correctly. I am sure forexfactory is interested in presenting the best system possible, so lets get our ideas out!
ForexFactory Cheats Exposed!
On April 20 Forexfactory quietly unleashed a neat little feature that allows for more transparent voting by showing who has voted for and against an article. I reckon today is reckoning day for the forexfactory cheats as well as a pat on the back for the majority of companiesthat it can be demonstrated are not cheats, which is the vast majority.
As a regular reader, I have noticed and I am sure many others have that everything certain companies write turns to gold in terms of votes. These companies/authors produce basic articles that are clearly no better than the next article yet consistently get a majority of votes and therefore views. I knew forexfactory was coming out with this vote transparency feature and I knew there was a ton of cheating going on, what I did not expect was to see how shameless and blatant the cheating was as I started to flip through posts and who voted for them (got screenshots of all the goods - will post if necessary.)
I do hope this post is not erased, there is not a very positive message to this post but at the same time certain companies have enjoyed massive amounts of traffic which they do benefit from, simply because they have greedily stepped over all the honest companies and perpetrated vote fraud, a few companies on a very large scale. Those who exalt themselves are eventually humbled and I think these companies need to be kicked off forexfactory, suspended, etc...it is not for me to decide but something should be done. For one, these companies are dishonest, and people should not deal with them, and two, I am not the only one who sees this and I have to estimate forexfactory quality will deteriorate if this continues to happen.
I dont need to post the screenshots here because these guys have not even attempted to cover their tracks...yet. It is so clear looking at the voters of these companies that there is massive correlations of the same voters over and over again. For 5 bucks a month or less you can get different IP addresses to post from, and if you have an organization with more than a few people you can get them all to vote, which you will see each of these companies does even without delving further into the data like IP addresses and same person voting each time.
The 3 most egregious, greedy cheaters, followed by 2 lessers are:
*fxinstructor - probably the worst of all, using tons of accounts to vote themselves up, even using 3 with names of people at the company or the company name itself
*spikecharts - tons of accounts all voting on each article, including multiples directly associated by name with the company (Manousarides, Spikecharts)
*forexmillion - has at least 4 voting accounts that vote on literally every article
*learningmarkets - double voting accounts from lmarkets and PFXGlobal, same company
*The LFB - double voting accounts, newstraderfx and thelfb, also lots of voting down competitor articles
It is important to note these guys do not even need that many fraudulent voters, as it only takes a couple votes at time ( few pluses for theirs and a few minuses for other competing ones) to push or keep their post on the homepage where it gets huge amounts of exposure and continues to get legitimate votes along with the fraudulent votes.)
Those were the big ones that really stuck out to me, like I said I expected people to be much smarter about their cheating and did not expect it to be this plain as day, so there may well be more out there but that is what I saw right off the bat.
It is sad, because these are all the guys you see each day, only there because they cheat and try to hoard all the exposure for themselves with their greediness, and exploit forexfactory's system to make it look like it does not work.
The voting system should be great, just like democracy should be. However, at times these things do not work out. I don't see how the voting system can work, because though it very clear who is committing vote fraud right now, the greediness and lack of ethics will not stop. They will just find ways to cheat that are nearly untraceable like massive creation of voting accounts from rented IP's! I would and do plead to forexfactory to do something about this, punish those engaging in these activities but even more important setup a voting committee or something because open to the public ain't going so well.
At last, I would like to thank all the companies that faithfully post most likely knowing full well that some are cheating, and yet do not do it themselves. This again, accounts for the vast majority of news publishers. THANK YOU!
As a regular reader, I have noticed and I am sure many others have that everything certain companies write turns to gold in terms of votes. These companies/authors produce basic articles that are clearly no better than the next article yet consistently get a majority of votes and therefore views. I knew forexfactory was coming out with this vote transparency feature and I knew there was a ton of cheating going on, what I did not expect was to see how shameless and blatant the cheating was as I started to flip through posts and who voted for them (got screenshots of all the goods - will post if necessary.)
I do hope this post is not erased, there is not a very positive message to this post but at the same time certain companies have enjoyed massive amounts of traffic which they do benefit from, simply because they have greedily stepped over all the honest companies and perpetrated vote fraud, a few companies on a very large scale. Those who exalt themselves are eventually humbled and I think these companies need to be kicked off forexfactory, suspended, etc...it is not for me to decide but something should be done. For one, these companies are dishonest, and people should not deal with them, and two, I am not the only one who sees this and I have to estimate forexfactory quality will deteriorate if this continues to happen.
I dont need to post the screenshots here because these guys have not even attempted to cover their tracks...yet. It is so clear looking at the voters of these companies that there is massive correlations of the same voters over and over again. For 5 bucks a month or less you can get different IP addresses to post from, and if you have an organization with more than a few people you can get them all to vote, which you will see each of these companies does even without delving further into the data like IP addresses and same person voting each time.
The 3 most egregious, greedy cheaters, followed by 2 lessers are:
*fxinstructor - probably the worst of all, using tons of accounts to vote themselves up, even using 3 with names of people at the company or the company name itself
*spikecharts - tons of accounts all voting on each article, including multiples directly associated by name with the company (Manousarides, Spikecharts)
*forexmillion - has at least 4 voting accounts that vote on literally every article
*learningmarkets - double voting accounts from lmarkets and PFXGlobal, same company
*The LFB - double voting accounts, newstraderfx and thelfb, also lots of voting down competitor articles
It is important to note these guys do not even need that many fraudulent voters, as it only takes a couple votes at time ( few pluses for theirs and a few minuses for other competing ones) to push or keep their post on the homepage where it gets huge amounts of exposure and continues to get legitimate votes along with the fraudulent votes.)
Those were the big ones that really stuck out to me, like I said I expected people to be much smarter about their cheating and did not expect it to be this plain as day, so there may well be more out there but that is what I saw right off the bat.
It is sad, because these are all the guys you see each day, only there because they cheat and try to hoard all the exposure for themselves with their greediness, and exploit forexfactory's system to make it look like it does not work.
The voting system should be great, just like democracy should be. However, at times these things do not work out. I don't see how the voting system can work, because though it very clear who is committing vote fraud right now, the greediness and lack of ethics will not stop. They will just find ways to cheat that are nearly untraceable like massive creation of voting accounts from rented IP's! I would and do plead to forexfactory to do something about this, punish those engaging in these activities but even more important setup a voting committee or something because open to the public ain't going so well.
At last, I would like to thank all the companies that faithfully post most likely knowing full well that some are cheating, and yet do not do it themselves. This again, accounts for the vast majority of news publishers. THANK YOU!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)