Yesterday morning, the forums had an upgrade, and one of the features of that upgrade was to expose who had voted up a particular post.... here's an example:
Lo and behold, you can imagine my shock and awe as I found a whole bunch of posts from WT which had the following footer:
In a previous job, I'd done a lot of programming to extract information from the web. One application in particular was targeted at grabbing stock prices from BigCharts.com (yes, this was a long time ago), and another was doing pattern matching within a group of webpages.
I'd already noticed WT's reputation score fluctuating out of proportion to his posts for some time, as indicated in the beginning of the thread.
So for fun, I modified my BigChartSnooper to become WorldSnooper. Sure enough, it showed jumps of 10 and 20 votes within a short timeframe, and pretty much daily. It more or less validated that there was indeed a haystack worth exploring.
Yesterday's short-lived upgrade to the forums simply confirmed what I'd suspected -- WT had been voting up his own posts.
I've posted a few more details over in another thread (
http://airlineforums...128#entry897896), but the short story is that WT was indeed gaming the system to increase his reputation score.
To be fair, I've held off on commenting about it further, hoping WT would be man enough to fess up.
Since he hasn't, I will use his own words to describe his opinion of people who were using the post voting system to placate their own self-esteem:
Apparently, WT is one of the mental midgets (or widgets) that he's attacking, as he clicked up his own posts ~1044 times, and even created a second profile to add another ~683 times.
I agree. Voting on posts does nothing to solve the problems at any airline.
Yet, WT appears to have invested a few minutes each day playing with those red & green buttons.
If you figure a weighted average of 5 seconds per button click (adding in some time to sign-out and sign-in as the alter-ego Spectator), that comes out to around 141 minutes over the last six months (since Spectator was created in October).
WT,
you voted up
your posts 1727 times, and you're telling other people
they have shattered self-esteem?
So there you have it.... straight from WT's own mouth....
WT not only used, but abused the voting system as a mean to "win".
While he never stated he wasn't actively "defending his reputation" by voting his own posts up, his comments above give the appearance he didn't really care what others thought about his writing, when apparently the exact opposite was true. He cared very much, to the point of engaging in 1727 mouse clicks to try and improve his standing here...
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"It is not realistic to engage in inappropriate behavior, and not expect to be called out on it."
WT, you've been officially called out.
The forum admins seem to have also taken notice --- as of last night, they took out the identifier of who had voted a post up, and it's also no longer possible to vote for yourself, which I'd say is a fair outcome given the gaming that was going on.
My apologies for going off on a tangent from normal discussion here, but when I first called attention to this several weeks back, WT went on the offensive. He decided it was more appropriate to call me out and attack my honor when he'd been caught abusing the system. And worse, he continued to engage in the same activity.
I've got news for you, WT. Honor is all about the actions you take when nobody else is watching.