I’ve gotten a considerable amount of comments and e-mail demanding that I take down the Rory Vote-O-Matic from this site, stating that it is morally wrong and potentially damaging to the campaign. I don’t agree.
Like most people who are first introduced to the Rory campaign, I thought it was hilarious and was instantly drawn in to participate in the madness. However unlike most people, I am a web developer and was also interested in how the voting system was designed. I was not surprised to find that the system was poorly designed and completely vulnerable to automatic voting.
So, I wrote a few lines of Javascript so people could take advantage of this and expose the poorly developed NHL voting web site. To me this seems very similar to the reason that the Rory campaign was born: to expose the NHL voting system as ridiculous by getting a third string defensemen into the NHL All-Star game.
Unfortunately, the gentleman who started the Rory campaign told the Globe and Mail that he does not see it that way. Apparently, he views the campaign as some kind of moral high ground when compared to automatic voting. I think with all the recent media hype, some people have lost their sense of humour. It happens. All I can say, is that I’ve stayed true to the cause.
I do it for the Rory fan. The Rory fan who has risked unemployment, spending a dangerous number of their employer’s work hours voting. The Rory fan who has carpotunnel in their index finger from voting so hard. I mean come on, just to see the look of pure madness on the face of the Rory fan the first time the Vote-O-Matic fires off a few votes for them. That’s what it’s all about.
I will end with a comment from a fellow web developer on the issue:
As a former web devloper, I find this hilarious that the nhl voting can be cracked so easily. The whole point of those weird images are that they are supposed to be randomly generated – it turns out that NHL made only 50 different HARD CODED images, that a simple lookup table can solve. The NHL deserves this because frankly, their web developers are morons.
Links
- Internet rebels boost unlikely NHL all-star
from The Globe and Mail - The Rory Vote-O-Matic (with interesting comments)
from James Mirtle’s blog