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Offseason Banners

Hopefully everyone should have got their awards a few weeks ago, if you have not received one it is probably stuck in your spam filter or I don’t have a working email address for you. Give the contact page a visit and let me know along with a working email and I can get you hooked up in no time.

A number of you sent in thank you notes and I am still working on the page to put them all on. I should hopefully have that done in the next week. If you placed in the awards this year, we encourage you to send us a short note thanking all the people who voted for you :)

A few of you have requested updated banners so you can promote the awards year round. I have just put online a few standard banners on the contact page to replace the ‘Vote For Us’ banners. If you have any problems, let me know.

~gu


Crash!

So as luck would have it, my hard drive crashed on my computer. The good news is everything is backed up. I have to give some props to Mozy [mozy.com]. They are on online backup service and for a few bucks a month, you can backup all the data you want (pictures, work, videos, etc...). My daily automatic backup finshed hours before the crash, nothing was lost.

Since everything is online (250Gb of data), it takes a while to download it to the new drive. Everything I do for this website was on that drive, but it should be done later tonight. I will be sending out the rest of the awards (only 2-3 categories left now) as soon as it is done.

~gu


Awards Are Going Out Now

I apologize for the delay in getting out the awards to everyone; I know you have been anxious to post them on your website. I have sent out about half of them so far and will be sending out the other half tomorrow. If you have never contacted us, please take a moment to say hi. Part of the delay in trying to track down unpublished email addressed for many of the winners. If you do not see anything by Wednesday of this week, check your spam filters and send us an email.

~gu


Honesty is the Best Policy

A week has passed since the awards were announced and as expected, there are those who are happy, those who snap their fingers vowing to do better next year and those who could never possibly lose unless somebody cheated them. I want to take a moment to talk to the last group.

For every concerned or upset email I have received on the results this year, I know there are at least 100 of you that feel the same way. To paraphrase them all "Isn’t it obvious that (Insert Winner Here) cheated?" I can confidently answer that with a simple ‘no’. How can I be so confident? Quite simply because I have seen the data myself, analyzed it, verified it and counted it (twice). Hopefully after sharing some of my methods it will become clear to you as well.

Voters who cheat have one characteristic that they all share and that is their voting location. Using freely available GeoIP (Geographical IP Address) tools, I can locate the area that each vote came from. Those who found ways to stuff the ballot were easily red flagged due to dozens or hundreds of votes from the same town in the same day.

Another characteristic is the computer itself. While no website can verify the identity of anyone from the limited information provided, they can create a basic profile. Think of it like trying to identify a robber on a dark night from a distance. You can’t see their face, but you can see it is a man with a red shirt, blue jeans and about 6 feet tall. If there were 200 reports of a man fitting that description in a night, you could be fairly sure it was the same man.

The winners that are posted all exhibit two traits, the votes have a randomly dispersed GeoIP locations and the voter profile is uniquely dispersed as well. To cheat, the person would have had to convinced people from around the world to vote for them... wait... "I see what you did there." - Philip J. Fry

Joking aside, nobody cheated. The methods I have used are FAR beyond what typical voting sites go through. To be honest, I haven’t heard of one that does. Nevertheless, the voting still appears skewed to many, and if it wasn’t cheating, what happened?

The awards were in some respect were victim to a lack of popularity. Only about a dozen sites were linking to it during the first stage of voting, and a few dozen after stage two started. While we had great voter turnout, you have to keep in mind that the sites linking to us are encouraging those voters to vote a certain way. Those who push the most voters to the site have an advantage.

Over the next 9 months or so, I will be discussing this issue and several others in an effort to make the awards better every year. In closing I will just say that I knew there would be controversy over the results. Taking the low road and preventing an inbox full of hate mail was within my grasp, but to be blunt... I would have to be fucking stupid to do that. It would diminish everything I am trying to do. Bottom line, honesty is the best policy.

Stay tuned, I will be answer more questions in the weeks to come. Keep sending in your comments, concerns and even your hate mail :) Congratulations again to everyone who won (and was nominated)!

~ gu


2008 Results Posted!

Before I go too deep into any commentary, click here to see the results!

First I want to congratulate everyone who ranked in the top 10 for this year’s 2008 Bondage Awards! It seems like ages have passed since the voting first started, part of me is wiping my head and glad the hard part is over with. The other half can’t wait until next year!

Over the next couple of weeks I will be preparing the awards and emailing them to everyone. If you have not written into the site or your email address is not listed on your website, please contact us. I will also be updating the links page with banners for the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners in each category. If you have a particular banner (468x60 or 468x80) that you would like used, please let us know.

During the ‘off-season’ I will be changing the main page into a blog to open the discussion for changes to the awards for next year and share any interesting news. Be sure to stop back once in a while and visit us on MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/bondageawards

~gu

Tony Batman gave us a nice write-up on his blog, check it out here

The Bondage Awards is now on Myspace! Make us your friend to keep up to date on the latest award news.

Visit us at: http://www.myspace.com/bondageawards