Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Awards

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alan9182

Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Awards

Unread post by alan9182 » 2013-03-10, 19:56

Until this afternoon Palemoon had a clear lead of well over 40% total votes, and it never varied by more than 1%
At 19:45 GMT this fell to 30% and Maxthon took the lead at 42%

Were they hacked or did they base the statistics on 16 bit integers that have now overflowed :!: :shock: :crazy:

dark_moon

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by dark_moon » 2013-03-10, 20:07

Indeed. This looks like a hack or somethink.

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Blacklab » 2013-03-10, 21:11

Guess who was Readers' Choice Awards "Best Small Market Desktop Browser" category winner in 2012 and also in 2011? I'm no pollster but those are huge winning margins? You might like to compare those results with 2010? :wtf:
About.com Readers' Choice Awards FAO's wrote:
What controls do you have in place to ensure fairness during the voting process?

Users must provide an email address or log in via their Facebook or About.com accounts to vote. Votes are limited to one vote per award category per user per day, and any votes not originating from the about.com domain will be rejected. We have internal checks in place to detect fraudulent voting activity, and in some cases the poll results shown during voting may not reflect the accurate final counts used to determine winners.

Please note that About.com polls are not scientific. Rather, they are a way for readers to share their opinions about their favorite products, services and innovations with About.com Guides and with other users.
There must be a way to advise About.com discretely of your observations so they can initiate their "internal checks" and confirm all is above board?

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by satrow » 2013-03-10, 21:51

Bots that vote only on the 2nd Sunday of March?

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Moonchild » 2013-03-10, 22:02

Either that or a sudden horde of (paid?) minions were set in motion...
(Considering Maxthon is/was developed in China it also wouldn't surprise me if this is a botnet example)

EDIT: In any case, About.com should see this as a clear "synthetic voting increase" and do something about it. If they don't, I guess it speak volumes for about.com and the already dubious fairness of a "1 vote/day" awards system as opposed to counting unique votes.
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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Moonchild » 2013-03-10, 22:14

Blacklab wrote:There must be a way to advise About.com discretely of your observations so they can initiate their "internal checks" and confirm all is above board?
Maybe About.com's browser twitter feed is a channel: https://twitter.com/About_Browsers - at least they seem to be reporting the intermediate results regularly.
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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Night Wing » 2013-03-10, 22:41

If "About.com" can't see the huge percentage difference between Maxthon against their next closest browser competitor, then the people at ABOUT are as dumb as the day is long when it comes to bot click stuffing.
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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Moonchild » 2013-03-11, 00:19

Tell you what though, I'd love to see some of the voting logs of today, to see what kind of work has been done to crank up the results for Maxthon in a matter of a few hours (Maxthon continues to steadily increase at a rather silly rate - now at 50% - while the proportional percentages of other browsers remain about the same, meaning it's mass voting on Maxthon's part rather than About.com making corrections). Notably, I haven't seen or heard any buzz about Maxthon with the nudge to users to go vote (e.g. no social media posts on Twitter/Facebook, etc.) so unless they have somehow motivated their users through in-browser advertising to start voting en masse, it looks like foul play.

Considering the currently obviously failing voting system and cheating safeguards, I'm removing the notice from the Pale Moon start page. People who are going to vote/were going to vote, most likely already have and/or are aware of the daily nature of the awards voting, so no need to keep preaching it - not with only about a week left in voting anyway. It looks like it's down to Pale Moon either being granted the fair lead it had with proper corrections to weed out unfair voting, or Maxthon claiming the award because of today's flood, considering how the percentages stabilized the past week or 2.
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lyceus

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by lyceus » 2013-03-11, 01:50

I cannot vote, it says that I already voted! And the suddenly Maxthon has 52% of the votes, yesterday was 24%. I smell that just they use the others for look legit and since for some reason Lunascape has 0% of votes (nobody vote for it? Even their creators? O'rly?). So I think this is just a souped-up Slashdot voting booth.

lyceus

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by lyceus » 2013-03-11, 01:51

I'll remove the notice in spanish forum too.

alan9182

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by alan9182 » 2013-03-11, 08:17

At 07:59 GMT Maxthon has leapt to 58% and Palemoon fallen to 21%.

If we assume that Palemoon has received zero votes since midday yesterday,
then the sum total of all votes until yesterday has been exactly matched by an equal number of votes since that time,
and every one of this avalanche of votes was in favour of maxthon.

The only sensible action for About.com is to extinguish maxthon and its votes from the list of finalists.

steviem1

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by steviem1 » 2013-03-11, 08:53

Bah, a clear case of vote rigging at its very best, me thinks. :lol:

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Moonchild » 2013-03-11, 09:34

I gave the page guide a nudge about it. Will see if it does any good.
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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Triton » 2013-03-11, 10:08

Even if those results are skewed and Maxthon "wins" again, the actual reality of the situation is the fact that PaleMoon is singlehandedly keeping the Firefox base sane and useable.

In my opinion, the Fox died quite some time ago and the bloated festering corpse of what it once was, is what we are seeing now - and things aren`t getting any better from what I see.

Awards and votes are all very nice I`m sure, but it`s the actual users on the ground who know what`s what ;)

dudewithit

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by dudewithit » 2013-03-11, 15:30

Well Firefox is getting bloated. But to say its a festering corpse would be a fallacy. Despite the general consensus, FF is progressively getting faster. And it has snatched back market share from Chrome.
I use the Nightly, and there are some nice improvements in FF21 and FF22. Specially the removal of main thread IO.

When main thread IO has been mostly removed, then AFAIUI compiler optimisations will give a larger benefit.(because then the program is directly dependent on the CPU, rather than wasting CPU cycles on IO) , right Moonchild ?

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Blacklab » 2013-03-11, 15:39

Just thought everyone might enjoy the Poll Results graph link: http://browsers.about.com/gi/pages/poll ... %3F&poll=3&

Maxthon almost growing as you watch - up another 4% (58%-62%) in just the last 8 hours! It's going to be the "runaway" winner! :lol:

nat_smart

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by nat_smart » 2013-03-11, 15:40

as my normal user vision, i surprise from i saw yesterday why maxthon super jump to leader but i sure this is tricky. :thumbdown: they pump poll or bot

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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Moonchild » 2013-03-11, 17:01

I just got a reply from Scott, the page guide. He says that at first glance, the traffic seems to be from legitimate sources and he hinted at it likely being a promotional effort of fans/evangelists/devs, especially through Twitter - which makes me think it may be clickjacking or Twitter persistent login abuse (voting is possible with a twitter login, and I guess that is what they are seeing in their logs).
Searching for relevant keywords on Twitter doesn't show any sort of buzz for Maxthon in these awards, so it doesn't add up. You can't create Twitter traffic without having tweets about the subject... Also, fans/evangelists wouldn't wait until the last weekend to suddenly create a buzz, they'd be on the ball from the start, especially with daily voting...

He will be investigating further and prioritizing checks of this particular category, which I applaud. I just hope it can be sussed out, because it really doesn't seem legit.
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Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by Night Wing » 2013-03-11, 22:01

This poll reminds me of an old adage. I've re-arranged the words slightly.

Concerning Maxthon, since it's of Chinese origin, "There's definitely something (sniff, sniff) smelling fishy in..............Shanghai". ;)
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lyceus

Re: Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Aw

Unread post by lyceus » 2013-03-12, 01:44

Anyway I will stop to vote since there is no way to defeat bots that way.

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