Morrus - your attention please?
Not a hugely regular poster by any means, but a frequent lurker...
I don't wish to point fingers or anything, but in the time I've been out for supper tonight and have got back in again (all of about 3 hours) the proportion of votes cast seem to have been shaken up quite considerably. Up until ca. 8pm GMT there was a fairly consistant trickle of votes in for most entries, and had been for much of the day.
I'd like to ask Morrus to discard 2 votes for 'Harmonies in the snow' from my current IP address (80.3.248.17 - that of the firewall at toreador.dyns.cx) since I was testing a theory of mine.
As far as I was aware the voting was restricted to one vote/IP address, or at least one vote/unique IP per time period. My recent test proves this to quite blatently be untrue, since I was able to vote twice for the same entry from the same physical (and network) location within the time it took to refresh the page each time. This in and of itself obviously makes a mockery of any voting that is taking place.
I didn't quite get round to entering an encounter myself (by 2am GMT the stat block wasn't looking quite right and I was too tired to take it any further) but I do know the author of 'Harmonies' (and considered it worthy of voting for regardless). Picked this one to test with simply becasue it was unlikely to get significant numbers of votes (based on past voting history) in the time period of the test.
For future heats this is something that perhaps should be taken care of, or another voting mechanism considered. I'm not in Florida, or I'd demand a recount...
Thanks to all who've taken part - it's been a fascinating competition to observe.