"I am surprised that you fully comprehend what is going on..."
Perhaps you give me too much credit. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/silly.gif" alt="" />
"...to prevent suffering the vote-down queue and yet you voted."
If one vote triggers 9 minutes of down voting, wouldn't that help convince the site to examine the situation? Normal voting is not going to interfere with the identification of down voting, since it is statistically insignificant (by definition). If up voting 'provokes' other game fans to down vote Riftrunner, then it should have only happened once.
Not voting may help convince the site owner that there is deliberate, premeditated down voting for Riftrunner. That shouldn't be necessary, in a perfect world....
"Let them feel happy and triumphant until they get caught or until we have a strong word to say."
A vote boycott on all of the games would eliminate any 'they did it to' (regardless of extent) type arguments, and greatly increase the chance of the site owner listening to calm, reasonable complaints.
"It is very hard to manually realise down voting spam if we insert one up every 7 or 8 down.
...
No moderator can manually delete 5000 shuffled up votes unless he was a pimp."
If the data is in any kind of reasonable format, the rate of voting could easily identify spamming. Votes don't have to be deleted individually (also assuming a useful format for the data), the sum of the spam votes just has to be deleted from the total, and the number of votes deleted from the total number. For all I know though, the votes could be written to a straight log file which gets overwritten every couple hours.
If the data is not kept in way which makes this easy to do, perhaps the site owner will change this in the future. A published graph for each game with the vote frequency each week for each vote level would discourage spamming; frequent up or down voting would be very evident, as would games with all 1 and 10 votes (I wonder if that is the norm...).
This could explain why previous adjustments dropped the number of votes, but did not change the average. They might have thought tracking IPs would be enough to discourage vote spamming, so only kept track of the sum and number of votes to any significant degree. Perhaps their apparent complicity or 'very sloppy and ignorantly managed site' all boils down to a poorly chosen initial requirement for their software. If so, they can not really do much without fixing this, and may not clearly see the benefit compared to the effort it would take to do properly. Maybe a vote boycott would illustrate the problem of relying on just IP logging.
Their behaviour could also be due to fraud / bias / conflict of interest, but their response to clear evidence of consistent down voting will refute or support that possibility. I would be inclined to bet they write the IP address for each vote in one file, increment the number of votes and update the sum, but do not keep all of the data for each vote linked, and are thus unable to compile or compare data in an effective manner.
OK, so now I'm in favour of a vote boycott again. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> I was never against it, just wasn't sure it would do any good.
