Your research sounds interesting and if published, something I would definitely read.
I find it all very, very strange, especially the 'shipping'. Obviously social media is breeding it more and the internet. I see some people who like different shows on twitter and 'shipping' seems to be their entire life, day in, day out.
I cannot imagine being so invested in something, especially that which is not real.

I am a fan of a sportsman who wins an award based on block voting. I vote once as they say you should, to me it means little to me as an award as I know how he wins it, most likely he would win anyway, but for me it feels wrong.

Wow and i thought three online votes and one phone vote was a bit much for the final!

I'm not sure that it would have made much difference to the final result to ban block voting, but I'd rather either they lifted the three online votes only thing or somehow enforced it better bc at the moment there seems to be a large number of people voting waaay more than others. The block voters never shared their methods on the main forum so most people are unaware that there's eben the possibility of doing it.

There's a difference between one person bragging they voted 56 times and organised groups voting 1000s of times a-piece. The latter I'm afraid is co-ordinated rigging to make the vote dramtically unrepresentative of public opinion, in the very least regarding the margin of victory. No one person "deserves" 100s of votes because they registered a few e-mail accounts, and going "oh I'm sure fans of all the contestants do it" isn't an adequate defence of the system. Before at the very least you had the cost and the time of a call to put a limit on how far people could game things.

I mentioned PR companies before but incientally I could bring up the possibility of betting syndicates. Very easily, if someone had the nous, a betting syndicate could have put large amounts of cash on Kellie at her pre-show odds, ridden the narrative of a "KELLIE COMEBACK", driven her to the win by very cheap methods, and creamed off huge profits without anyone being much the wiser as to what had happened. I doubt Jayfans would be so pleased about it saying in the rules that you can vote as many times as you like then...

Voice of reason. Multiple voting is simply wrong.

I voted 200 times for Kellie every week. In the final I voted 508 times. I don't regret it at all.

No, you must be mistaken
The only multiple voters were for Jay ...

There seems to be an assumption that only "jayfans" block voted and although he might have won without them, they assured his victory. And also that only supporters of Jay block voted. Really?
Every supporter of Kellie / Katie / Georgia only voted online with their "allowed" three votes and if they wanted to chuck more votes their way, they spent their paper round money on phone voting?

I totally accept Monkseal's argument against rigging votes to clear up in the betting stakes, I'm not sure how robust the BBC ID system is at avoiding automated robot voting.

I also suspect that those who proudly proclaim that they voted 100s of times are using hyperbole.

Yep - i admit, I have three BBC ids for voting set up several years ago.
I did create three more for this year and then my stupid PC forgot the saved passwords for the original three.
And then I got bored...

I would think that skewing the result with block voting might be possible in the early stages when the votes are spread across 15 people but must get more difficult as the number of contestants drops. With only three contestants it must be very difficult to skew the voting because there are quite likely going to be equally enthusiastic fans of more than one contestant, perhaps all three.

Who said? I've seen reference on here to 'all the polls' but I'd be interested to know where to find these

And no, I'm not a Jay detractor - I thought he danced very nicely - I'm merely trying to get to the bottom of the so-called popular opinion that seem to have prevailed from so early on .. before we'd really had a chance to form balanced opinions of all the competitors!

I wonder if the attitude to block voting would be different if it had been, say Peter Andre who had won because a group of hardcore fans voting en masse. It's not so bad for folk this time as Jay won and he was a general favourite but that might not always be the case.

I do understand this opinion, but I'm not sure it's that easy. This could only make money in the last stages to bring about a 'surprise' winner at good odds. The internet is surprisingly self-regulating in some ways. Most seem to agree that Jay would have won anyway, because of the high level of interest in him across numerous social media sites from very early on. In order to make a lot of money, groups would have to fake this high level of support for weeks for a 'dummy' contestant and get behind their winner at the end. This would be hard in terms of the sheer volume of coverage required. I'm not saying this couldn't be done, mind - but hard to pull off. If Kellie had won thanks to co-ordinated block voting, I'm not convinced this wouldn't have caused significantly more uproar and outrage and possibly official investigations, because she just didn't have the social media evidence for that level of support. The internet really does have its own weird form of triangulation going on.

Despite all this, I would be happy to see a system that precluded block voting in a systematic way as it is the contestants that lose. I noticed at the bottom of a couple of press articles today reference to Jay's victory being brought about by fans multi-voting, some even commenting on something that sounds remarkably like, and probably is, this thread. To me, it's already sad that the headlines have been so far away from a job well done / celebration of a fun TV show. If the very people who supported him most contributed to this, how doubly sad.

Considering Peter Andre is a seasoned expert in the world of media manipulation, I'm surprised he didn't go further.
Clearly not paying them enough...

(Feel free to stick in "allegedly" wherever you want!)

Yes, it is an odd and sometimes disturbing world. There's a lovely, fun element where people bond over a mutual interest not shared by people in their real life -akin to most users on this forum who will dust themselves down, think. 'Ahhhh, that was nice' and get on with their Christmas. For a few, it's a welcome distraction from a hard time. At the extreme end, it's a full-blown addiction with real consequences.

Lots of research on fan culture out there, if you're interested. Henry Jenkins is a good place to start.

The BBC makes no money from votes - on-line voting is free and phone voting is just the cost of the calls and the system. This isn't the X-Factor.

The BBC sends emails to verify email addresses given for voting - presumably to stop systematic voting.

It is possible to vote more than once - I don't - but it couldn't be done on a huge scale manually as it would be physically impossible in the short time allowed to vote.

People have phoned more than once right from the beginning of Strictly - again I haven't - but there's a physical limit in the time allowed, not to speak of the expense. So again it can't make a huge difference.

There's a lot of fuss over this by the Sun - a Murdoch newspaper. Hmm.

I think it makes sense to vote that way if you wanted Katie out, and the poster I saw said (s)he only voted that way in the first round and didn't vote in the second round at all. As for Katie being a shoo-in/out, many thought Jay was guaranteed the win from jive week but still multi-voted for him in the final.


The boy that lived next door to me was never a "slapper".


I think it helped that people didn't really know him from the boyband days so he was able to shed any negative associations.


I don't think the separate appreciation sub- forum was started to "protect" the appreciators. The appreciation threads (AT) were clogging up the main board to the point that many forum members started complaining. In the early years there were rarely more than 2 pages on the SCD DS forum and I was able to read every post on every thread and still hold down a full time job!

As the show got bigger, so did the number of threads and number of pages of threads on the SCD forum. People wanted to discuss other things but all these other threads would get pushed onto the second page by people constantly posting on the ATs (there was one for each couple, and separate ones for each professional dancer so it filled up nearly the whole first page of the SCD forum). The ATs also seemed to set the mood of the forum - posters from the ATs would come out of them and berate anyone saying anything even remotely critical of one of their favourites on the other threads. Whole threads were started just to outline how people should post/behave (always be "pink and fluffy" ). The "This is Most Definitely Not An Appreciation Thread" (NAT) was originally started as a rebellion against the forum police. Unfortunately it's now turned into the beast it was trying to kill. The "In the confessional...unpopular Strictly/DS opinions" thread is more what the NAT intended to be. Anyway, I digress.

After all this in-fighting, one year a separate sub-forum was created, in order to:
1) Stop the ATs clogging up the main board.
2) Stop AT posters trying to control the main board.
3) Stop posters going into the ATs and complaining in retaliation.


Wasn't he odds on favourite after the jive? Betting odds are driven by how much money people are putting on something, so the public were putting bets on Jay to win from early on.

As I said earlier in the thread, I think ideally it should be one vote per person, so I agree with the principle people argue for.

That isn't actually the reality of the situation now though and the BBC have set up the rules and seem OK with multiple voting.

After you vote twice, it is basically a matter of degree. I expect all the celebs have had voters who voted more than once.

I'd like it to be one vote per person, but it's not - and that's the real world.

There is no reason to think that Jay wouldn't have won easily if it was one vote per person, so if that was the case, all the multi-voters wasted some of their time and money (in theory).

Well if you have to verify your email address, I didn't do so, so any of my (and possibly other's) multiple votes won't have counted!

Unfortunately, it seems from some of the admissions in previous posts multiple e-mail accounts have been set up specifically for the purpose of block voting, which isn't difficult to do and not beyond the wit of tech-savvy fans to set up & verify the addresses quickly.

One way of minimising block voting may be to scrap the online (free) vote completely & hike the price of a phone vote to say, 99p (with 84p going to Children in Need).

It may not stop some of the more obsessive fans of any contestant in the competition, but it might serve as a monetary deterrant to the extremes of excessive voting being discussed on this forum.

Then hopefully the 'genuine' voters would be reassured it wasn't a "pointless exercise" as one poster here put it.

Even if this didn't deter block voting completely, the end result would be more money raised for Charity.

Whilst not a perfect solution it's better than the one in place at present.

Measures such as these need to be introduced quickly IMO before rags such as the Daily Mail/Sun etc. get more traction against SCD and it bites the Beeb on the a*se.

The Beeb isn't doing itself any favours either IMO by refusing to publish the amount and percentage split of results, unlike the scramble to get the voting results for Sports Personality ready for public consumption.

It may have been decided that the BBC isn't required to give the details of the SCD result under the Freedom of Information Act (link & extract below), but I would argue the public have been invited to vote on a contest where a payment transaction may have taken place and therefore it should be completely transparent.

http://www.tellymix.co.uk/reality-tv...ed-by-bbc.html

BBC Statement

"Although the BBC is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, information which is closely connected to our programme-making is not covered by the Act. The Information Commissioner, who regulates the Act, has confirmed that information about Strictly Come Dancing voting is not covered. We are therefore not required to disclose the voting figures under the Act."

I didn't have to verify an account, never got an email to.

I agree with you, I do not understand why they do not publish the results, especially since they did the SPOTY ones.
People have said as it may be damaging to careers, well these sports people are more liable to be wary of them as if they get lower votes there is the possibility of less lucrative sponsorships. What difference would Georgia's vote percentage have on her career?
It makes no sense at all.

That really is the big one for me. Some weeks I found it hard to force myself to vote. It's just clicking a screen, I know, not deep cleaning my kitchen () but clicking has nothing to recommend it as an activity. I did my democratic duty however, before any fellow GG fans are tempted to scowl at me!

Looking into it a bit further, verifying emails seems to have been done at random - happened only to some.

Seems to me the solution - it's technically fairly easy to do - if people are worried.

Personally think all this fuss over Strictly is all a storm in a teacup - whipped up by the tabloids.

Yes, because look what happened yesterday at Sports Personality. There's no way 278K different people voted for Kevin Sinfield. He's a super sportsman but I sure there was some sort of mass voting going on.

Theirs is more scrutinised though, don't they throw out votes for joke nominations?

I agree. When I saw those figures it was obvious what had gone on.

My concern for both this and SCD is betting scam/syndicate. It needs to be scrutinised by Ofcom which covers this issue even if it is BBC. Going back to paid phone votes is probably the only answer. Financial restriction cuts back on mass voting.

I must be naïve as I honestly didn't think it was possible to vote for more than 3 times online.

I thought that was your limit and after that you had to pay for extra phone votes.

It doesn't sit right that people use the system to vote for free so many times.