It’s always unfortunate when we’re forced to act to protect the integrity of the competition. Let us clearly give you the ‘red flags’ that allow us to target models that may be cheating, or possibly circumventing our system. First and foremost, the average model who is competing in the competition receives approximately 75% of their traffic from referrals (these referrals come from bulletins, Miss MySpace USA banners, or other are areas in which the model has posted a link within the myspace community. Of course, we do not measure all the models….we usually focus on those in the Top 10.

The Top 10 models within the competition average 85% referrals from bulletins, banners, or other tracking devices that drive an individual to vote to a specific models gallery. When we measure the Top 10 models, and our tracking finds that the model has dipped below, or significantly below this percentage, we begin to closely monitor the model. We pull all of the votes, all the Ip addresses, and begin to look for common threads, voting by proxy (hidden), and the lack of ‘referring banners or bulletins’ to their profile.

The most recent model that was deleted was receiving only 10% of their votes from referrals (banners, bulletins, etc), and this made serious red flags go up. We noticed this last week, we let everyone know we conducted our audit (as we wanted to see if we continued to see the pattern)….and yes, unfortunately, it got worse…and the voting by proxy exceeded 80% of the actual votes. While we cannot and will not accuse any model of cheating, we reserve the right to delete any model at any time for any reason.

We hate going to this extreme, but it’s our responsibility to protect the integrity of the site. It’s not the first time a model (in the lead) has been deleted, and we are sure it’s not the last. Finally, we require our models to adhere to high ethics when it comes to sportsmanship…and we hope you will continue to do so. Good luck…and keep on voting! We’ll be watching!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS