The Accused Takes Issue With Yid With Lid

You may remember that this past Sunday My Bagelblogging friend and I jointly posted some charts that showed that one Blog Owner received 1,200 votes in a two day period (one of those days was Shabbos, a low traffic day on Jewish Blogs). Other Issues were also mentioned liked posts coming off and being reposted as new, and the crappy blog rater (which in the post I say there is no proof for).

We waited till Sunday to post because it was after the Voting had closed so it couldn't influence voters, but before the votes were announced so it wouldn't seem like sour grapes (or bitter lemons)

Today I received the following letter from the accused.

Hi,

Hope you are satisfied with your JBlog results.

There's little substance to your post implicating us in manipulating the voting results. We simply changed permalinks structure (you can check that in Google's cash). Somehow, that copied 10 or 15 recent posts into the JBlog feed. Normally that shouldn't happen because RSS works with post id's. Anyway, 10-15 posts change nothing on the background of 300+ posts duly rss'd before. Besides, adding new posts simply splitted the ongoing votes between two copies of the same posts without affecting the average. We mailed a message to our large subscription list a day before the voting, asking them to vote. Naturally, they voted mostly 5s. We do receive our share of 1s, by the way.

You do a decent job in your blog, and I hate to take that matter further. Please remove your post questioning the JBlog contest, and let the matter rest. Also, it does you no good to question the results: with only 20,000 visitors to your blog, 6,000+ votes with extremely high ranking could seem suspicious to over-zealous critics.

The good news is that he explained the posts coming off and on,over and over so that they appeared to be new every day. While I don't understand the answer, The JBlog folks have accepted it so I do too.

This is how I responded to the email from the accused.

Dear XXXX ,
Thank you so much for your email. Unfortunately you do not address the main point which is that you received1200 votes in two days. I received 150 votes during that period, and put up eight new posts.

Thanks for noticing my counter; I actually have 4 different counters, the oldest, which has been connected to this page since September has a little over 20,000 page loads, but actually only 19,000 of the page loads were on this site. I used to have it on a failed businesses site. Its only been attached to Yidwithlid for the past five months. My Counter(s) aren't there to brag about page load---they are there to see who has been on the site and where they came from and which articles they like the best. This particular counter say the site has an average of around 4,000 a month.

I have a different one [counter] that only gives two months of activity at a time (because I am not a paid member) that one shows 12,500 views in the last 60 days and average of around 6,000 a month.

A third one shows approximately 11,000 views since October 26th when I signed up-- an average of around 3,700 a month.

So when you average those three counters, I get on average around 4500 views a month or 54,000 a year so it is not surprising how I can get 6,000 votes And that doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that I was spammed with an average of 5 bad votes per post per day for around two months. I usually have 10 posts up at any one time so that probably gave me around 1000 spam votes (the vote crapper didn’t go to my site)

Also for the last few months I changed my feed so the entire posts showed up on JBlog. So for those who read JBlog there is no reason to go to my site.

As far as the crappy votes, I had a mathematician friend run an analysis. He looked at the time people posted on their blog and compared it when the first five was put on their Jblog post after the owners and compared it to the ones and twos spamming put on my site and 4 others. This mathematical analysis showed that there were three prime candidates to be the crapper, you were one of them. But to me the results were not definitive that’s why I said it couldn’t be proved.

So I guess to summarize, my feeling is Dave at Jblog made his decision and I will not fight it or bring it up again unless I notice the pattern again. But I will not take down the post, it is not on my home page anymore, or on the Jblog list because I have put up 20 posts since then. However, if you do explain how you averaged 600 votes a day on a Jewish Blog Aggregator, especially when one of the days was a low traffic day Shabbos, I will post that I was wrong and why.

Warm Regards;
Sammy Benoit

Please note, I have changed the contents of both letters slightly to clean up the English.Nothing has been revised to change the meaning of any sentence

To be honest folks I consider this matter closed and hope he does too. I posted our letters just for there to be a public record and to eliminate any "he said--she said" type of stuff.

My Bagel Blogging Buddy also has some comments on the matter which you can read here.