Our poll began way back in 2001 and over TEN MILLION votes were cast from all over the planet to determine our Top 40 List and the Best 5 TV Shows of All Time! The rest of this page explains how TV_Vote worked and tried to solve problems our TV_Voters had with our site and only remains here for history :o)>
Your Number One Problem:
You
try to vote after waiting over 60 minutes and get the Sorry page!
Here's why: You must browse directly to our
site to vote. Voting and then returning to vote again from saved or saved
temporary pages may give you the Sorry page even though you have waited
over 60 minutes between votes. You may also see a File Not Found page for
the same reason.
To speed up your browsing, your browser maker or Internet Provider may be saving our pages in a temporary file on your computer or on their own server.
The solution is to click your browser's refresh button when you come back to the site to vote. This will reload our site completely instead of giving you a temporary page stored on your computer by your browser.
Web accelerators work by storing copies of recently visited sites as temporary pages on an outside server or on your hard disk. You must browse directly to our site to vote. Voting and then returning to vote again from saved or saved temporary pages may give you the Sorry page even though you have waited over 60 minutes between votes.
AOL users should use Internet Explorer instead of the AOL browser or turn off the AOL web accelerator feature, which stores our site as temporary pages on AOL servers. That goes for anyone using a "web accelerator" (EarthLink and other Internet Providers have them too.)
Coming to our site from a search engine or Favorite bookmark may cause errors for the same reason. Search engines save temporary copies of popular web sites on their own servers to speed up their answers when you search. Some bookmarks can lead to temporary files stored on your own computer.
The solution is to click your browser's refresh button when you come back to the site to vote. This will reload our site completely instead of giving you a temporary page stored on your computer by your browser.
Our Number One Problem: People try to cheat!
Yes, it's true. A small percentage of our voters (1% at the most) are so fanatical that they just can't play by the rules. It seems incredible to all of you who are in it for the fun of it - let's call you the Good Guys - but we have our share of Bad Guys like any other universe, so first let's clarify what happens if a Bad Guy gets caught cheating:
If we are counting the votes and we discover too many votes per IP Number* or any evidence of proxy voting despite our safeguards, we delete all votes for that IP Number. Nobody should be able to vote in this poll more than 24 times in one 24 hour period. If we see that happening, we don't count any votes from that IP Number. The cheater may not see this happen if he is voting for one of the more popular shows in our polls, but we delete votes every day.
You cheat and we delete!
If we discover after posting daily totals that a show has gotten more votes than humanly possible in a 24 hour period, we will go back and recalculate. If we missed a Bad Guy or an obvious robot, we will remove the appropriate number of votes from that show. That's right, we will penalize the show. (Our regular voters will remember a couple of corrections of this sort in our history.)
Warning! If some twit keeps doing it long enough, we can block his IP Number completely. (We have never done this, but our code has that option.)
Even Bigger Warning (Threat, maybe even!) If somebody comes up with a new way to cheat and we get really mad, we have the Ultimate Weapon hidden up our sleeve. Our TV_Vote code also allows the addition of the so-called Captcha method of blocking automated voting. You've probably seen this on other sites. The user is presented with a random group of letters and numbers that he must enter separately to validate his input. We hate this idea and we don't ever plan to add Captcha to TV_Vote unless the Bad Guys take over. We hope just mentioning it will strike fear into their hacker hearts.
We know some multiple votes are accidents or due to more than one person voting from the same computer and we're not really all that cynical. We just have to assume the worst to keep things on the level.
That
Pesky "Sorry" Page
When you vote, you will usually get a Thank You page telling you
that your vote was recorded. If you try to vote more than once in 60
minutes, our annoying Sorry! page will appear and no vote will be
recorded. The Sorry! page is only a reminder telling you to wait longer.
You will still be able to vote 60 minutes after your last successful vote.
If you vote and traffic stalls the site out without showing the Thank You
page, try voting again without waiting. If you get the Sorry page, your
first vote was recorded.
Timers!
We don't frelling care what bots you
run on your own system to remind you to vote. One of Firefly's Browncoats
has a special reminder app available for Windows, Linux and OSX called
FlyVote for just that purpose (and it can be used for any show) at
http://www.usbmicro.com/misc
There is also a Mac timer from Apple at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/home_learning/apimactimer.html
How you remember to vote is up to you. We want your votes fair and square is all.
How
We Count Your Votes
All votes recorded in the TV Vote Top 40 and
Nomination Polls are collected daily and loaded into spreadsheets. The
numbers are then scrubbed for errors, sorted and counted and parsed into
various files that report the results back to you on the TV_Vote website.
The exact routine for doing all this is no big secret, but we figure it
would sound pretty boring to most of you so we'll skip the exact details
:o)>
What Counts and What
Doesn't?
You can vote once every 60 minutes in the
TV Vote Top 40 Poll.
You may vote for as many of the Top 40 shows as you want each time you
vote in the Top 40 Poll!
You can vote for one show every 60 minutes in our
TV Vote Nomination Poll.
In the Nomination Poll, we only count votes for TV series that are not on
our Top 40 Ballot. Votes for Top 40 Shows or anything other than a TV show
will be deleted from the Nomination Poll results, not counted. Click
here for an explanation of how a nominated show
is added to the Top 40.
If you spot an error in our count, post a message at our TV_Vote Google Group to let us know and we'll fix it.
Totals
and Backups
We count and report the votes once a
day now, seven days a week, barring some unforeseen circumstance. The new
count is usually available after 1 PM US EST. We do daily backups of the
site and all data. We destroy all raw data older than seven days.
We tell you that you can "Come back sixty minutes later and vote again until you get bored!"
It's true!
Most of you understand but some of you don't get this at all. It seems pretty simple to us: vote for your favorite show(s) and wait sixty (60) minutes before you vote for that show again.
We do not use cookies or collect any personal information about you when you vote. Each time you vote we record your show choice(s), the date and time you voted, and your IP Address.
We now track every vote on this site by IP Address. If you come in too early or try to ignore the 60 Minute Rule, your vote will not be recorded and you will receive a Sorry message telling you to wait.
If you're worried because you don't know what we mean by IP Address, keep reading :o)>
Well, even though we don't collect any personal information about you when you vote, every transaction on the web leaves a calling card behind in the form of a unique IP Address (Internet Provider Address.) An IP Address is a sequence of numbers typically looks something like this: 195.160.205.1
You may have seen episodes
of recent TV shows where an IP Address is used to trace the Big Bad to his
Secret Hideaway and foil his Plans for World Domination. This is mostly
fiction because there are millions of IP Addresses active on the web every
second. But every user connection does have a unique IP Address so an IP
Address can tell us exactly when a voter visited and voted.
Your IP Address is really one of a block of many addresses assigned to
your Internet Provider (the sample above belongs to an Internet Provider
in Romania) and is reassigned to you when you go online by your Internet
Provider.
Every time you sign off
and back onto the web, your Internet Provider will assign you an IP
Address from his block of addresses. It may be exactly the same (a fixed
address) or a slightly different address each time you sign on (rotating
address), but the first two numbers in the IP Address will always be
recognizable as belonging to a unique Internet Provider. Because only a
tiny number of users (compared to all Internet users) hit our site, we are
therefore able to identify every voter by IP Address.
So each time you vote for your favorite show, you are sending us data that
includes an IP Address and your vote looks something like this:
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. = 195.160.205.1
= 04/29/2008 = 04:14:34 AM
And when you vote, your IP Address is filtered to see if you voted in the last 60 minutes. If you haven't voted in the last 60 minutes, you get a Thank You message and your vote is recorded in the daily file. If you haven't waited long enough, you will get a Sorry message and your vote will not be recorded.
Two
or More Voters from the Same Connection
What if two voters are voting
from the same computer, network and / or Internet Connection?
How To Vote A New Show Into The Top 40
The top show in our TV Vote Nomination Poll will replace the lowest show on our Top 40 Ballot when the nominee receives one hundred votes more than the lowest show on the Top 40 Ballot. The replaced show will then move to the top of the Nominations List and the nominee will move to the bottom of the Top 40 ballot. Changing the Top 40 Poll code involves some work on our part, so we decided use this 100 vote bump to widen the gap enough to prevent two shows from battling it out day to day and making our lives more difficult. (Lazy, maybe, but at least we finally figured out a way to do it!)
Fans of shows that get bumped off the Top 40 ballot can, of course, reinstate their show by voting for it in the TV Vote Nomination Poll.
The TV_Vote
Fan Power Hall of Fame
When a show reaches a total of a
quarter of a million (250,000) votes, it is permanently added to the
TV_Vote Fan Power Hall of Fame.
To see the current Hall of Fame roster and find out more about this unique
bow to Fan Power, click
here or
on the Hall of Fame menu item at the top of page.
Over the last decade,
we've collected hundreds and hundreds of pix to use in the TV_Vote banners
(the little TV on the main page of the site), but as the Top 40 changes
there may be some among you who would like to contribute pictures from
your favorite show. Our latest Gunsmoke banners, for example, were
populated by one of our loyal Gunsmoke fans and none too soon as Gunsmoke
pix are hard to find after you run through the better known sites.
Not that we would ever condone the illegal copying of Copyrighted
materials, of course, but if you do happen to have such things lying
around and are wondering how to send them, here are some guidelines.
Send your own pictures. We don't really need pictures already up somewhere
on the web. If you know of a picture site, just send us the address
because we've probably already been there.
We don't really need pix from Firefly, Xena, Bonanza, U.N.C.L.E., Doctor
Who, The X-Files or any of the Star Trek shows unless they are totally
rare. There are massive picture libraries online for all of these. (Behind
the scenes shots would be considered rare.)
We welcome pix from all the others (especially older shows) and shows on
the move up the Nomination Poll list.
Size requirements. The pix you see on the little TV are exactly 255 pixels
wide and 160 pixels tall so we don't want anything smaller and we prefer
larger (bigger is better, guys, believe it or not) so we can shrink them
down and crop them and refocus them (this usually improves the quality.)
Resolution. We use a screen resolution of 72 dpi in the banners, if you
know what that means, but we can adjust from any resolution so if you
don't know what that means don't worry about it.
File types. We would prefer JPG (JPEG) or PNG file types. GIFs are OK but
they only have a maximum of 256 colors so they usually look crummy
compared to JPGs, unless they are black and whites.
Fan shots?
It has also occurred to us to start including submitted fan and fan
convention shots if you think they are totally amazing. (Your sister
meeting Worf in full makeup or something.) No promises but it's an
interesting idea. As long as it's OK with your sister, of course.
How To Send Us Pix
Easy! Email them directly as
attachments to
Don't be shy! We really are looking for pictures all the time.
Banner ads on our site lead mostly to other fLAtDiSk NeTWoRk sites or our Amazon and Lulu and Zazzle stores featuring TV_Vote and fLAtDiSk related products. All of these ads and sites have been investigated by us and judged spam and adware free. For more info, read the fLAtDiSk NeTWoRk Privacy Policy.
Banner ads we used to run by Google on the TV_Vote web site were part of the Google AdSense program and contributed a fraction of a penny toward paying for our site when you clicked on them. Unfortunately, Google decided we had too many repeat visitors or something and dropped us, so frak them. Might not be a coincidence that one of Google's AdSense advertisers is Nielsen, the company who does all those ratings that get your favorite shows cancelled, and that Nielsen happened to start their own Internet poll site (Hey Nielsen) after TV_Vote started getting wildly popular. (Grrr, Nielsen! Get outta' my sky! :o)>
We hope this will answer any questions or suspicions you might have about the totals you see on this site. (See also the keen stats and charts on our Voter Information page!)
TV_Vote is an honest poll. There wouldn't be any point to it at all if it wasn't honest.
Many of the shows in our
polls have their own boards and groups with TV_Vote threads and we think
that's cool (and yes, we lurk) so we encourage you to visit sites and
boards and groups for your shows and others. Most of fan groups now have
their own resident experts on TV_Vote who can answer basic questions about
our polls but if you need further advice you can always
post
a message at our TV_Vote Google Group.
So come back and vote often and
remember to wait 60 minutes between votes!
Watch that clock and you too can help
your favorite show become one of
The 5 Best TV
Shows of All Time!
Our TV_Links page gives you links to fan groups and forums for the most popular shows on both our polls! Try it! If you want technical info on a show, you can also look it up on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) site. Despite the "Movie" in their name, the IMDb lists most TV shows, old and new.
