" As you know the winner of the competitions is decided by a vote of forum members all of whom are entitled to vote. Voting for yourself is perfectly acceptable and is not a problem. However I'm not too sure whether or not getting friends to sign up purely to vote for a particular entry is within the spirit of the competitions.
After a problem in a previous competition I put a mechanism in place that highlights when this type of thing happens and sets an alert if the voting seems a little "unusual".
Of course any incident will be assessed on its merits but in the spirit of a fair fight it's something to keep in mind."
Kim,
That was me they were talking about.
Last year I entered & was suddenly removed because of the exact thing stated above. I had no idea, but my husband had people at work vote & they thought it was an unusual amount of voting at one time. Anyways, it got pretty nasty between them & myself. The stinky part about it was that I didn't know anything about it & it was all done innocently by my husband, thinking he was doing a nice thing for me. The only person I had asked to vote for me is Suzib. The part that upset me was John didn't have the decency to email me first before posting my name on his website & claiming I was purposely cheating to win & how sad it was that I would go to such lengths to get a free action, blah, blah, blah. I was so angry. My husband went to work the next day & posted an apology & explained what had happened. I wish he didn't apologize, because he didn't do anything wrong, but he saw how upset I was. The best part was according to John I was winning anyway. Im sure if you look far enough back you will be able to find the entire incident in the "Competition" section of the website. I will be going to the site now to vote for you. Good luck!