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I know there's always cheating going on, but let's be reasonable

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Critical Fertilator: The Micromanager of Macronutrients

Obvious? Not to someone that is a little dense I guess. Cheating? Who? Where? What?
Sorry. I'm new........... hope that is a good enough excuse for not understanding what you are trying to say.

In ... 408???

Are they paying people to click on the button?


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

"Cheating? Who? Where? What?"

Aquabid has an inflated vote count, over four hundred.

Aquarank and Aquabid are operated by the same guy. Maybe it's some kind of error, like an extra zero got added at some point. I didn't see anything on their forums about Aquarank except for one notice, but it was filled with incoherent people. Only thing suspicious about it is that the last post in that thread was yesterday.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Thanks Sirbooks........... but what does in & out mean, & what period of time is the vote count for........... for just each day?

"In" is the number of votes they have recieved. "Out" is the number of times people have gone to the site from the link on Aquarank.

><>

And the votes are tallied through a week, starting over on Sunday mornings. I think they reset the votes between 7:00-10:00 U.S. Central time.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Oh....ok........thanks guys.

I've been a little suspicious about that myself.

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."

Aquabid is at 508 and we are only at 59. Something "Fishy" going on... pun intended

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"it's the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking."

Yeah, damn that Goldfish Utopia and their dirty tactics!

Oh. You meant Aquabid.

Joe Potato

"In" is the number of votes they have recieved. "Out" is the number of times people have gone to the site from the link on Aquarank.

Something to be added to the FishProfiles FAQ I think - so that we have a permanent record of this, allowing newcomers to find this out quickly.

And the votes are tallied through a week, starting over on Sunday mornings. I think they reset the votes between 7:00-10:00 U.S. Central time.

Again, if the latter part of this is confirmed, something else that should go into the FAQ so that members can find out how the voting works.

As for the numbers above, well, it does look a little suspcicious. The numbers I'm reading now are:

AquaBid : 516
FishProfiles: 69
UltimateBettas.com: 56
Age Of Aquariums: 53
Goldfish Utopia: 53
Total Fishkeeping: 51
FishForums.com: 47
Discus Forums: 46
Fantasy Reef Forum: 41
Aquatica! : 31

Now I don't know how many members the other Boards in that list have, but FishProfiles has something like 12,000 members at the last count. How many of these are regularly active is unknown to me (Adam probably has the stats) but let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are 200 regularly active members (i.e., they post at least once per day, every day, averaged over time). Thus, FishProfiles has the ability to deliver 200 votes on a regular basis if all of the active members vote daily. Add in odd votes here and there from newcomers who have yet to establish themselves, and assorted intermittent members who pop in after a break, then we could push that tally to about 220 or so. However, let's take the 69 votes above as representative of the voting population, which means that approximately 1/174 of the membership votes regularly. (I suspect politicians would have a purple fit if they suffered a turnout on this scale, but that's another issue ).

If the same situation is replicated on the other Boards, this allows us to infer likely membership numbers for those other Boards - which would see UltimateBettas.com with 9,700 or so members, and Age Of Aquariums tying with Goldfish Utopia at 9,200 members. Admittedly thre is a considerable margin for error here, but if we accept these values, then AquaBid, if we are to believe the above statistics, has 89,700 members ... anyone know if this figure is even remotely correct?

Mind you, one thought that does cross my mind is this. A small Board with only a couple of hundred members could shoot up the rankings if all of that small membership was active and voted regularly. An established Board might have trouble overcoming this, even with a large membership, if its active participants are smaller in number. I think Adam might also start to wonder what he'd got himself into if he suddenly found himself with 500 active members, especially if a significant proportion posted the kind of posts I do - the demands on disc space would mount up at a frightening rate in that case! (For the record, the files I have saved on my hard drive as backup copies of my important posts (i.e., ones likely to be referenced as articles among other things) run to around 3.2 megabytes, which is quite a lot of storage to be used by plain ASCII text files ...).

Let's see, I've racked up over 4,800 posts ... my average post size is 833 bytes. Contender for the title of 'most verbose poster' perchance?

It would be interesting to discover if the above 'back of an envelope' calculations bear any resemblance to reality however ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

It's getting worse by the minute....they now have over 700 votes and we are in '2nd place' with 80-some-odd????

What the ______????

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."

Well, if you've been watching who is #1 each week, it has been changing. One week it's Ultimate Bettas, then it might be Goldfish Utopia, or Fish Forums. I've notice that FP never is #1 anymore and I'm curious if it isn't a ploy by whomever operates the AquaRank site to get "exposure" for the other sites to encourage their continued membership.

FP for the longest time was consistantly #1 on a weekly basis, but hasn't been for a long time. It's pretty obvious that a bit of jealousy is at work.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

I noticed that too. I have been coming here to this site over the years but only recently registered. I used to see FP as #1 with (with good reason). Now I see that Betta site all the time and I know Bettas are great but a site that is dedicated to Bettas only is kinda, well, its shouldnt be that popular!

Oh, and yes great thing to place in the sit FAQ. Calilasseia. I always wondered.

"Talk is cheap. Action can be almost as affordable"

What is the norm or the expected when it comes to voting? If someone belongs to a site is it considered the proper or polite thing to vote whenever you come on to the site?
I don't know what proper etiquette is when it comes to voting for a site.

First of all, in answer to Fish Patty, the thing to do (which I try to do but sometimes forget) is this.

Step 1 : Log on to FishProfiles.

Step 2 : Upon being logged in, click on the AquaRank logo.

Step 3 : When the new browser window pops up, click on the link.

Once the list of top 25 sites appears in the new window, you can discard it and return to FP.

Next, I just took a look when voting and discovered that AquaBid now has 960 votes listed. It's starting to look to me as if what's happening is that the votes for all the other sites are being added to AquaBid's total as well, which to me seems the only logical explanation for a tally that is 10 times higher than ours ... in fact, i decided to do something interesting, and took the tallies for the top 25 as follows:

AquaBid : 960
FishProfiles : 97
Goldfish Utopia : 76
Age of Aquariums : 71
UltimateBettas : 70
Total Fishkeeping : 67
Discus Forums : 64
FishForums : 54
Fantasy Reef Forum : 48
Aquatica! : 43
The Fish Board : 39
Aquatic Predators : 37
Reef Lounge Online Forums : 34
Piranha Forum : 30
UK Aquarist Forums : 30
Aquaria In The World : 29
Aquatic Terrors : 29
Hidrobotanik : 27
Goldfish Paradise : 25
Fish-Addicts : 25
Betta Forums : 23
Applesnail.net : 23
Aquashop Marine Aquariums : 18
Aquarium Advice : 18
ChingMix Discussion & Community Forums : 16

Now, take everyone from FishProfiles down (positions #2 to #25) and add the totals together. It comes to 963.

Allowing for a small margin of error (and the possibility that any "cheat code" that adds other people's votes to AquaBid's has a time delay added to make it harder to detect a pattern) then it's looking a bit suspicious isn't it?

Perhaps someone might like to keep a periodic check on this and see if AquaBid's total keeps matching or approximating the votes cast for the remaining positions #2 to #25 ...



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

I think something is up with that. If you look at all the In and Out numbers...they are all relatively close range (i.e. 50 in and 40 out)...but there is a 787 number difference in Aquabid's In and Out. Maybe that doesn't say anything...but the fact that Aquabid has sooo many more votes than the others does. I haven't seen them at #1...ever.

*Kristin*

Wow Cali.! I hope you have kids that you passed that "energetic" gene onto!

Its up to 987 now, this isnt very discreet if they are skewing the results

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" Simpsons