Sorry to the people who are fed up with this topic and want it to die, but I'd just like to reiterate a point which is possibly being overlooked.



Everyone who has commented in this blog is fully aware that vote "cheating" won't make the blindest bit of difference as to threadless' decision to print a design. That is painfully obvious.



For me, the main issue here is that, because its now evidently a lot easier to fix a score (so to speak), it potentially messes up the scoring system. Half of the fun of voting on submissions is the anticipation of the final average scores, no? Dare I say this won't be the only occurance of such a attempt!



Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way

All signs point to a vast right-wing conspiracy.

mgill52 on Jun 10 '09 at 2:13pm

I like that Lisa Loeb sont "stay" :)



I went to camp with Lisa Loeb

Ahhh shuddap with your philosophy speak. I get that enough from my girlfriend ;)

i dont see anywhere up there that he said he forced people to 5 it. he just said he asked people to vote for it - which is pretty much the same as every other way people promote their subs isnt it? he just seems to have been more effective than anyone else has been to date. i also think this is similar to giveaways and all that stuff.



maybe then everyone who has ever given something away here and related it to one of their subs also be criticized? and if they actually won and had their sub printed, i think they should be forced to buy whatever stock remains of their win.

ISABOA on Jun 10 '09 at 2:10pm

my score average went UP when i stopped notifying my friends that I had a sub for voting





I stopped using the email forwards after my 3rd submission.

And I only got my friends' attention on threadless when I got printed. I don't think everyone of them bothers to check my sub when I blog about it on my social network if at all.. :(



I think the idea of threadless is still foreign to them :/

I went to camp with Lisa Loeb





!!!!!

I so wish Lovemonster would give away internet time for people to come here and defend him/her.



I like when things come full circle.

if vote loading™ really is such a global problem that puts everything we believe to be real in question, maybe they should try something like the place that rhymes with yurt toot does, and only let people vote if they have purchased a shirt. i dont think any of this really matters, but that could maybe help solve a make-believe problem? i short, i have no idea what im talking about.

I'm really curious to find out how many of his vote were "voter loading" votes and what the difference would have been without them.

I also promote it to the customers by giving them extra 30mins internet time for free if they vote for it.



@ evan: I didn't say anything of forcing anyone to give me a 5.

Ok, I've had a change of heart and believe that you had no ill intent so I have to apologize for suggesting earlier that you were down-scoring designs when I had zero proof. It just seemed very coincidental considering some recent low scores but I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. There are a lot of new users out there and I suspect someone much less scrupulous is the reason behind this.



Actually, there's nothing for you to even apologize for because you're just doing what Threadless encourages people to do and that is to promote your design, which I certainly have nothing against. Also, I've looked through your previous subs and some of them are cool and scored well on their own merit. I think the elephant design would have scored really well even without the extra help. Anyway, sorry for being so paranoid.

I think we all have cause to be paranoid like that, cairo. We all love our own designs... and we certainly have our artist fav's. I don't know for sure how others feel but, when I see pieces that I feel should not fare as well scoring higher, or vice versa, I get the impression that something is awry. That's certainly how I felt this week when I saw this, and then I saw how poorly one of my favorite artists from last week scored.

wow - this blog is so interesting!

I want to weigh in on this arguement.....

I agree that promoting your designs is fine and asking people to join up and score is fine (not that they do though - I've been tryin to get some family votes but as someone ^ said - some people just dont get threadless)

I think Love Monster went overboard but I do symphathise with him (not too much though cos he's outscoring me!) as a new person it is hard to promote your designs because the people that have been here longer all know each other and do tend to comment and score their friends (i'm not saying they all give each oter 5's) I think promotion gets easier and easier as people get to know you and if you get into the community a bit more.

So I guess what I'm saying is - he's apologised - lets get on with it and hope that people do the right thing and vote for designs based on the merit of the design and not on who the design was done by.

......and fake accounts are bad bad bad!

What's up with this guy? http://www.threadless.com/profile/967337/stick_figure



He's getting tons of votes and really high scores too. I agree that it doesn't change a bad design into a good one, but it *is* weird, and a little frustrating.

Like I said before it's a good thing you apologized and explained everything but I just can't get passed that offer of 30 minutes free( even if you didn't tell them to give you 5) because you seem like a really reasonable person and I just think a reasonable person would see that wasn't the right way to promote yourself because I agree with Evan, that's called bribing! And I would like to hear from threadless staff and what they think about the whole thing, is it right or is it wrong?

I think I may have mentioned this before...But since Threadless has been exposed to Twitter, voting seems to have gone haywire?

It could also be due to a sudden influx of Twitter's setting up accounts here and voting down designers? Who knows

Just throwing it out there....



wtf: Those designs are whack! ^^

FA, thanks for posting the british t-rex... omg, it had so many comments even the page wouldn't load up properly! T-lou made a great point earlier too - everything has gone belly up since Twitter tees....

kirstenmccrea on Jun 11 '09 at 1:56am

What's up with this guy? http://www.threadless.com/profile/967337/stick_figure



Yeah, that guy is straight-up suss. I don't think he has an internet cafe and his scoring average is really low. If anyone's giving out undeserved 0s to make his look better, it's him.

T-Lou on Jun 11 '09 at 3:27am

I think I may have mentioned this before...But since Threadless has been exposed to Twitter, voting seems to have gone haywire?

It could also be due to a sudden influx of Twitter's setting up accounts here and voting down designers? Who knows

Just throwing it out there....



wtf: Those designs are whack! ^^





and the "Twitter Conspiracy of 09" was born.



I'm sure the staff is crunching data on the voting, it's going to be interesting what they come up with.

ISABOA on Jun 10 '09 at 2:10pm

my score average went UP when i stopped notifying my friends that I had a sub for voting





I stopped using the email forwards after my 3rd submission.

And I only got my friends' attention on threadless when I got printed. I don't think everyone of them bothers to check my sub when I blog about it on my social network if at all.. :(



I think the idea of threadless is still foreign to them :/



Yes. People that I know don't speak english and they can't even make an account cause they don't understand the process. I always send emails for 2 friends and to my girlfriend. And I always put links to the designs in my msn. I don't have a lot of msn contacts and I'm not sure if people pay attention to them, but I'm trying. In the end, I got 3 or 4 peeps who always support my work. :)

The least you could do is to apologize and ask the TS staff to remove all the fake votes and I'm glad you did. The nice thing here is that it's easy to spot anomalies like this one since we are already familiar with the voting system. It just won't go unnoticed.

In the end, it really just comes down to waiting for a response from the Staff. That is, if they even feel the need to clarify things. I think Love Monster's been been pretty honest, so who knows if there's even a need to investigate further.

I think there is a need so something like this doesn't happen again and after all this least he could've done is to apologize and yes that's what he did but to me it just doesn't seem enough... I'm sure the staff is doing everything possible and I really hope they'll give us a response!*I'm calling for SuperFesta to come to the rescue!*

Not to play devil's advocate but all the new people Love Monster brought in are now aware of Threadless which translates into potential sales and a larger voting pool. Plus those new people might tell their friends about it and so on.



Yes, it might wreak some temporary havoc in the voting but over all I think the staff would view it as a positive thing. They know exactly what's going on so it won't affect what gets printed anyway.

FA, thanks for posting the british t-rex... omg, it had so many comments even the page wouldn't load up properly! T-lou made a great point earlier too - everything has gone belly up since Twitter tees....



yes - I went and checked it out too - that was crazy - and it wouldn't load up for me either as there were so many damn comments! Whilst it is great to get all those new people in - I doubt all those people that joined just to give that guy a 5 even log on to threadless anymore. And I kinda think thats a bit lame coz your only joining to give your friend a 5 and not getting right into it (as in scoring, subbing and buying tees)

Threadless fixed everything, and yeah, it's clear this guy was voting other folks down... They removed the bs votes, and things are good again.... I love threadless, and feel that justice has been served!

yeah....if they removed all the ip addresses that had been voting up and down, then this guy MUST have been lying! :S

scottv on Jun 12 '09 at 4:34pm

skeev, the scores we removed were tied just to this one person abusing the system. It was not a large amount of unconnected users.



A number of subs were effected, but they should be better now.

fascinating...

So glad Threadless was able to correct this. It depresses me that it appears Love Monster was voting designs down after all though. *sigh* That's what I get for giving people the benefit of the doubt.

I'm still hesitant to blame love monster for all the low scores on peoples' designs made from his bribed voters, I'm going to try and put that down to those voters' poor ignorance at the scoring system/ votard syndrome as usual. I'm just happy that he was honest about what he'd done and that any impact his promoting methods may have caused on other designs have been rectified.

Yeah, you know, that's true brentendo. He probably didn't have control over how the people in his internet cafe voted so I guess that makes it more complicated. Anyway, he seems like a decent fellow so that's what I'd like to believe.

so basically, you have to cheat to get good scores, but don't cheat too much, because it will look obvious... lesson learned i suppose...

i still think that it was stick figure that was doing it and not this guy. unless they are the same.