Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 9:09:42 PM
So I've received quite a few emails on some of the voting schemes out there and have also done a bit of my own research. Sadly, it seems that there is at least a little bit of fraudulent voting going on. This is a real downer because what this means is that we have to take time out of the long weekend--time that we could be spending with our friends and family--and devise a system to correct for this security-flaw. Obviously, I can't go into details regarding the security system that we now have in place, but in a nutshell, we're able to monitor and audit fraudulent votes.
I know that everyone is just trying to support causes that they really believe in, but we have a responsibility to maintain Search Kindly's credibility and reputation. And we would be neglecting that responsibility if we were to let the fraudulent activity slide.
Please understand that this will only effect continuous, repetitive votes from the same device and that all legitimate activity will not be filtered out. Another thing that is unfortunate about the fraud from this week is that we are eventually (probably sooner rather than later) going to be moving to user account-based voting. In other words, we're going to have to ask you to register at Search Kindly in order to have your vote count. We really, really wanted to keep things as simple as possible--which is the way that we currently have the polls set up--but simple doesn't always mean fair. And in our opinion, fairness is what we should always be striving for.
Another bit of news relating to voting has to do with the frequency of the "money-rounds". Some time in the next couple months we are going to moving to weekly donations. What this means is that every poll is going to trigger a donation. In other words, there won't be any more qualifying polls. This will be great because we will be able to donate to even more organizations--but the initial donations are going to be about one-quarter the size as the monthly donations. On the other hand, Search Kindly is really starting to grow, so even the initial weekly donations should be for a respectable amount.
