You may have noticed a couple of changes I made yesterday.

1) Every 5 votes, there is a CAPTCHA test. This is to prevent auto-clicker voting tools. Let me know how this works for you. For more information about this particular CAPTCHA, click here.

2) I was able to determine at least 1,041 votes that were obtained through auto-clicking or other completely inappropriate methods. As a result, I deducted these votes from the Sea Shepherd vote count. I don’t mean to say that this necessarily catches every inappropriate vote, but hopefully the new system in place will do the trick going forward. The vast majority of Sea Shepherd supporters are good natured and I could see it from going over the chat logs.

3) Chat has been disabled until I can implement some sort of flagging mechanism to remove inappropriate posts. If there are other ways that you can think of to control chat abuse, tell me!

4) I made a small change to the avatar script. If you still continue to see inappropriate symbols (eg. swastika), tell me.

Let’s all try to be good!

Thank you to everyone that wished me a happy birthday. I had a great time and I am getting back into the swing of things.

I received A LOT of e-mail since I have been gone and I will likely not be able to respond to all of it. I am busy with my full time job at this point, so we all need to continue being patient! There have been a bunch of complaints recently and I will need to implement some changes that will hopefully alleviate some of these problems. However, there are a couple of things that will absolutely not be tolerated:

1) Aggressive or offensive languange

2) Advocating click fraud

Anyone found to be involved in this type of behavior will be locked out of the site. This site is meant to introduce visitors to new organizations and meet other people that support particular non-profits. I am trying to implement a link submission system where visitors can submit relevant articles/videos/pictures/etc, so that visitors can really explore different organizations and learn about them. You should all be good to each other and open to learning about organizations that are bettering society in different ways. If your cause doesn’t win this round, there is a new round a few days away. To that end, the donations are an added bonus at the end of each round. However, this can only be continued if people don’t abuse the advertisers at Vote4Cause. If you see something that ACTUALLY interests you, then feel free to explore that sponsor. If not, don’t click it.

I know it’s only a select few that are involved in this kind of activity, but we all need to do our part to make this an enjoyable community!

So today was a loonnnnng day! I really tried to smooth everything out. It definitely seems better, but that pesky memory error is still there. I am going to try to get some outside advice on this because it is driving me nuts. I have little system admin background and I am trying to run this on a shoestring budget, so there are bound to be problems like this. I know we have a close race right now and it’s a shame that all of this is going down entering the last day of voting for this round… but I can’t control when the site is going to get busy and bring these errors to the surface. It is getting busier and the purse is already bigger than last round! AND there is still a day of semi-functional voting left.

I did change the voting to 60 seconds to try to alleviate some of the stress on the system. Seems to have helped minimally, but it’s clearly not the culprit… so I may change it back once everything is smoothed out. I know the frustration that everyone feels when the site doesn’t work well.

Now here is the kicker… I am heading out of town for my birthday until Monday evening. So, if anything goes wrong, we all just need to be brave and give our voting fingers a rest. Maybe take it to the spa or stay in and watch a movie with it or (for those who don’t want to take a break) go running with it up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art while blasting “Eye of the Tiger”.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their weekend!

PS. I wanted to say that I thought the comment made by someone on the boards saying they would get a tattoo of that memory error was hilarious. (if you have it done, send me a picture!)

Hey everyone! Please bear with me with the chat functionality going haywire. I am not much of a system administrator and I am learning this on the fly. While I can fix the problem, I am working to make it so that it doesn’t occur anymore. Thank you for your patience!

I am trying to make some changes, so the server will be up and down.

UPDATE:
I have made a bunch of changes to try to make it more efficient. I know that there have been problems, but the traffic has been growing and I haven’t had time to work on things. Hopefully, things will be better, but I will continue working on it!

UPDATE 2:
So, I gave it my best shot today. In addition, I rolled out some of the new stuff I have been developing. Although still incomplete, this is more a test to see how this new set-up holds out. There may very well still be problems and I hope that you are all patient with this! I am happy you are all enjoying the site.

We have already broken the record for number of visitors today AND the day isn’t over yet! We also have a close vote-off on our hands. Will it be PlayPumps International or Farm Sanctuary? Both are very different from one another, yet both are very deserving causes. I hope everyone gets a chance (when not busy voting!) to explore their websites because they both are doing great things!