Okay, seing as how CyberStretch has managed to bully me (joking) into this thread, let's see what we've got so far, sort through what might be viable and what isn't, and see if there's a concensus on something that might go forward as a proposal. Seem fair?

Please bear in mind that I'm not a serious programmer and know nothing about how the backend database is actually structured or interrogated, so even if something seems like a good idea, it might not be attainable in practice.

I wish I had a suggestion to throw into the pot myself, but I haven't. So here's a precis of what's come up so far and how it looks to me.

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Ideas that don't seem to be workable (to me anyway), and why

Only allowing one vote from an IP address. If we all had static IP's this would work fine, but many folks have dynamic IP's from a dialup account. So only allowing one vote per IP would likely not stop clone voting and may inadvertantly block a legal vote because somebody already had that IP yesterday and voted from it.

AOY be decided by a cumulative annual total of the AOM votes. Probably (but not definitely) this would result in a Poser artist being the AOY every time since the Poser AOM contest is likely to get the most voting.

Voting in a thread. This could well discourage people from voting at all, or fell compelled to vote for their friend who is in the running even if they prefer someone elses work.

Tallying 'contributions'. I think it'd be very difficult to come up with a fair system for doing that. Freestuff? A lot of folks, me included, don't consider their stuff good enough to put on display. MP purchases? Not everyone uses the MP, and it could look as if we were using that criterion to drive people into the MP, further fuelling the 'only interested in the bottom line' argument.

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Ideas that might help

A minimum time of membership before being allowed to vote. As stated before, this would eliminate instant clones. One problem I can forsee is that this would disbar new but valid members from voting, which might not be acceptable.

Blocking open proxies.

An account should have been used in the month prior to the vote being cast.

Tracking the amount of time a member is here. I really like this one, and it's got the most chance IMO of working. It would have to be very carefully done not to exclude users of dialups though...

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Any further ideas, thoughts/whatever? Any agreements/disagreements on how I've categorised things?

Kevin.