Dirty work afoot at Best Small Market Desktop Browser Awards

[Moonchild]

News update from about.com:

We have completed analyzing all current votes in this category, particularly those registered in the past 72 hours. All votes have originated from legitimate sources, and there is no evidence of vote manipulation or poll abuse. Thank you again for reporting your concerns, and be assured that all categories will be fully analyzed once the voting period has ceased and prior to the winners being announced. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any further questions or concerns.

So, basically, there's no conclusive evidence on their end about the votes being manipulated, or rather, in their words, conclusive evidence that there is "no reason whatsoever to believe that any votes within this category originated from an illegitimate source", despite there logically not being any reason for the sudden burst of votes - I guess if the current analysis doesn't show a reason to discard votes, then the final analysis isn't likely to find a reason to either, so that just leaves me to congratulate Maxthon in advance on winning the award by whatever means were used (be it through technical or through social engineering).

[dark_moon]

Hmm can you remove PM from the vote list?

We don't need a corrupt vote site i think.

[Blacklab]

....be assured that all categories will be fully analyzed once the voting period has ceased and prior to the winners being announced.

In light of their statement I don't suppose About.com could be encouraged to publish their voting graphs for each competitor (X/Y axis: No of votes/Hour) for this "browser category" for the last 3 years? It wouldn't breach anyone's privacy and it would prove everything was fair and above board.

If the same "burst" of Maxthon votes occurred in 2011 and 2012 then I think we could all, including About.com, draw some pretty obvious conclusions?

[Moonchild]

The only conclusion about.com is willing to draw is, and I quote, "it appears that Maxthon's sudden spike in votes may be a result of some of their fans/developers/evangelists recent promotional efforts on social media spaces - particularly Twitter." They see what they consider a spike in votes from legitimate sources, and assume Maxthon simply pushes its users at one particular point in time to go vote, at an arbitrary point in time during the awards' voting period. This would make sense, but I indicated that Twitter shows no traffic at all of the nature needed for a high volume voting, but that was summarily cast aside. If this assumption by about.com is correct then graphs showing voting volume/progress won't prove anything.

I did notice however that the moment Maxthon started winning with large margins, they stopped showing the number of votes behind each graph entry (2010 shows raw votes, 2011 and 2012 don't). So, in the end, I can think of a few possible scenarios here, some of which having about.com itself as a consciously guilty party.