This message is to give you background information regarding TheBeast27. The reason we are doing this, is because he is claiming innocence and accusing us of victimizing him. This is the second time he's cheated, disqualifying him from all future
contests, as per
guidelines. Over half a dozen accounts matched his IP, all with the same exact start of the email address. One of which voted for him in the contest,
@autogrower.
If you read
@autogrower's posts, you will find that after he bumped the first 50 posts to qualify for voting, almost all of the remaining 98 posts are congratulating TheBeast27 on his contest entries, which in itself is yet another level of campaigning. He even said the same exact thing in every one of TheBeast27's half a dozen grow journals.
People often cheat, then become embarrassed and upset when they are exposed. This was actually his third time being caught, first time was prior to our
contest amnesty. Unethical behavior like this wastes our valuable time and energy.
We've been dealing with this kind of behavior for years, and it's always sad to see them go down in flames from their own actions, however karma does work and it works fast here. We are on our toes, working around the clock for you guys and gals, creating the fun environment we all love so much.
Due to this last outburst, we have decided to make all voting public, so you can see what we see. The privilege of anonymous voting has been abused by cheaters attempting to fly under radar, then stirring a revolution against us when they get caught, claiming innocence.
This situation gave us the idea to create this language, being added to all contest
guidelines.
Now that votes are publicly visible, it should be obvious who is voting. We have endless ways of discovering cheating and are always successful. If you are caught cheating, your entry will be deleted and you'll be called out in the public thread, visible to everyone. Reason being that in the past, when we removed the offending entry without any announcement (to help minimize embarrassment for the member), it often led to uninformed (or worse, misinformed) members questioning our motives and calling us censorship nazi's. More often than not, the cheater themselves would claim innocence, causing a higher workload for our staff. For these reasons, we now alert the community of what happened, to save all the confusion and massive workload on our team.
We hope this helps your perspective a bit, so we can all move forward.
Thank you for your patience, understanding and support, we are truly grateful.
Sending you lots of love and positive energy,
The 420 Staff