Grounded
Yesterday I asked for your help in choosing the final entrant in the Nashville Flugtag. At the same time, a group of folks at work decided to make a last ditch effort to push us over the top. Some were refreshing the page after voting using a regular web browser with cookies disabled, others used an app which refreshes the page for you after voting and also allows you to hit return to enter the verification code as opposed to clicking the button on the page itself.
You might interpret these actions as cheating, but take a look at this email sent to all the wild card entrants from the Nashville Flugtag flight control:
Hey Wild Cards!!!
Here is a link that you an send to friends and family to vote for you!!!!
http://redbulli.com/flugtagNashvilleWildcard/wildcard.html
Also- I found a sneaky way for you to vote for yourselves more! There are cookies that are enabled in your computer which is how Red Bull can tell if you’ve voted that day or not. If you clear your cookies you can vote over and over again for yourselves!
Let me know if you need anything else!
Good luck guys!
All of the other teams are using this information to their advantage, and so no one was worried that they might be casting any illegal votes.
At the time I posted yesterday, our total stood around 13%. Shortly before lunchtime today we were threatening to overtake the 2nd place team with around 24% of the vote. Thanks to you all that made that happen… however, the folks running the show over at Red Bull have decided to eliminate all of our votes from yesterday plus hundreds more for good measure. Our percentage dropped all the way down to 9%! In addition it seems they’ve blocked votes coming from certain versions of Firefox running under Mac OS X. Obviously Griffin is pretty big in the Mac world so this is a pretty big handicap to overcome.
Despite Red Bull already having crowned the New York team as the winners, I’m not quite ready to concede just yet.