If you click here and vote for “Closet Ho,” by Jerkwater Jive, it’ll really help out my friend Rick. See, this is a contest, JWJ is his band, and if he wins, he gets a cool record deal.
So please, please, please click. It’ll only take a second. And I can vouch for the fact that his song IS the best song there, for those of you who feel some moral badness in stuffing the ballot box.
Bead, for future reference, if you’re going to do this, please don’t make the link clickable. Leave it in text, and have people cut and paste it in their browser.
When you click on a link, your browser sends certain information to the web page it’s calling: it identifies what type of browser, the OS, etc. (so the website can react accordingly) AND it sends a “Referre:r” field, whick tells the other website "I was sent here by a link on ‘such-and-such’ page. This is not something you can shut down from your browser settings [though some personal firewalls, like AtGuard will let you block or even fake referer fields, active content, browser ID, cookies, etc (on a per site basis)]
If the guys running the site notice a sudden flood of votes for Jerkwater Jive, and they are logging referer fields (which comercial sites usually do) then they will be able to tell that vote-rigging is happening. In fact, they will be pointed directly to this very page. They may void out the votes, or void Jerkwater entirely.
Or they may not care.
If you leave the URL in text, for us to cut and paste, our browser will treat it as if we typed it in, and leave the Referrer: field blank. The other site can suspect tampering, but they can’t prove it.