As most of you know, Lee and I decided to close the voting of the BTS Video Contest because of some fishy voting patterns we saw the day before voting was to end. Collectively, we decided that the best thing to do was to pause the voting until we could investigate the suspicious votes. Unfortunately both Lee and I were out of the country and could not look into the issue until last week. What we found was no one was actually cheating. After talking to the creators of the top 4 most popular videos, we all came to a fair compromise: we would open the contest voting for an additional 4 days and change the poll so voting remained hidden. You can watch the top 10 videos and cast your vote HERE if you have not already done so. All previous votes are still valid and part of this contest.
The whole idea behind this contest was to have the Fstoppers readers vote on what video they though was the most instructional and innovative. We clearly said that if we found users creating multiple accounts then their video would be disqualified. What we found was some of our readers are just better and campaigning for votes than others and having your friends vote for you was never against the rules. So again, we think the most fair solution is to allow a few more days for voting. To be eligible to vote, you still have to have 3 posts after being registered for 24 hours. I personally hate that this voting experience wasn't as smooth as we had planned, and we definitely want to get a camera in the hands of the winner. Good luck to everyone and feel free to use facebook, twitter, and even the good ol telephone if you want to drive votes to your video. Thanks again to everyone who participated in our first ever contest and be sure to check out the monthly contests over at www.fstoppersforum.com