Fun With Hate Mail - Part Deux

Once again I fall victim to blame for events which I had no prior knowledge of. Apparently, members of my website have been committing the unforgivable sin of "cheating" on an online poll! *gasp* - say it isn't so! - but, in defense of this concerned email writer, this is an online poll of the utmost importance! This isn't just ANY poll! This is a poll by hellomagazine.com asking, "who is the Most Attractive Man?" (can you feel the urgency now??? ... or at least my sarcasm?)

Below is the email I received from a concerned online voter... whose choice of hottest male celeb is obviously losing.

*names have been changed to protect the stupid

xxxxxx to admin
show details 11:39 AM (10 hours ago)

I would like to say that it seems a bit pathetic that your members
feel they need to insult another human being in order to appreciate
Rob Pattinson.

But...beyond the insulting, nasty comments I've been seeing... it
would probably help your cause in this magazine poll if your members
didn't PUBLICLY discuss your methods of cheating the "one vote per 10
minutes" rule.

Hello Magazine will be checking the votes, and probably the IP behind
those votes, before they publish the final results. Isn't it best to
play fair, than to cheat and feel like you're winning, only to have
tens of thousands of your votes removed because of cheating?

Those of us on the other side of the battle have simply been using
timers to make sure we know when our ten minutes is up. No cheating,
and we encourage all our fellow fans not to cheat. For us, we already
know who's the best, and we already know that attractiveness goes
beyond mere shallow appearance. We'd rather lose honorably, than win
by cheating. Now, if both sides were like that, it would be a much
less nasty competition.

Just thought I'd let you know the reputation your members are giving
your forum, and it's not pretty.

In response to this, I ask - is life so bad that losing an online poll about who's the hottest has you that stirred up? Personally, I'm not even a fan of the Rpattz! My website has plenty of other members who feel the same way too! 

For anyone to think that this is about such a noble and worthy cause as finding out truly, who is the most attractive male, female, or whatever is terribly naive. Likewise, for anyone to think that there is going to be a team of highly trained professional judges to be sure that this vote count was completely and totally accurate by cross referencing tens of thousands of IP addresses from the frantic teen-to-middle aged female online voters and questioning every cyber hanging chad, is absolutely... absolutely....... oh... I can't even come up with a word for it... I've already used "naive," and "stupid" is just condescending. (Fill in the blank with something combining those two words and there you have it!)

Let me educate you... When you go to this website to vote, you may notice something other than the actual poll off to the side, top and/or bottom of the page... those are called "ads." Websites make money from these "ads."You may notice that lots of times the "ads" change each time you click and the page loads again. Each click by each visitor makes the website money thus, lots of visitors means lots of clicks which means... money.  But, how does a website go about getting lots of visitors to their website? Once the visitors are there, how does the website get the visitors to click lots and lots of times? Hmmmm... I think a poll involving highly popular celebrities will do just the trick! After all, we females are fiercely loyal to our favorite attractive celebrities... even to the point of wanting them to, say... win a fun yet ultimately meaningless online poll. So, we vote and vote and vote! And how do we vote? We click! And what does each click mean for the website? That's right - $!  

And so, in summation, I'd just like to say - Chill out... it's a gimmick! - a stupid online poll about who's hotter!... all's fair... And can you really account for each of the individual voters on your "side of the battle... using timers???"... yeesh! come on!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to vote for Orlando Bloom...