Vote issue & server population/popularity(?)

[Neutrol]

Hello,

Shortly after I discovered this issue I wanted to bring it to light. Now I'm not sure if this is actually already a known issue but I couldn't find anything relating to it after a quick search, so my apologies if this is actually nothing new to the staff.

But the issue itself fairly simple in regards to voting. In the vote panel, after clicking the icons for the respective websites, where you do the actual voting process for the server, the smolderforge website actually seems to count that alone as voting and thus rewarding you with vote points. Not the actual voting process in the respective sites, but the mere act of clicking these buttons.

This has potentially, in my opinion, quite some ramifications to server population/popularity, depending how spread it is (mostly in that how many people actually know about it and "abuse" it, because it is potentially quite a bit of votes lost, so to speak). Perhaps if you could directly somehow fetch the actual vote buttons from those websites (along with the captchas) and embed them into the vote panel and so ensure that vote points truly only get distributed, only and only when the player actually votes for the server. Of course that's just on a theoretical/idea level, I'm not a web developer or a programmer or any of the sort myself so unfortunately I do not have any real technical suggestions as to how to actually fix it (if you even can), but I hope that there are people, whether moderators/adminstrators/developers or other people reading this, that would have the know-how to solve this issue and do something about it.

Best wishes,
Neutrol

[Henhouse]

Hi there,

I'm actually aware of this, and have been for a long time. Many vote sites for many years did not offer any sort of "callback" system where they would send a notification to our servers informing them that User X from IP 1.1.1.1 has voted for your site (an example). So back then, this wasn't possible. Nowadays, most do offer some sort of system like this, but with them arriving so late in the game, and us not really prioritizing implementing these, we're sort of made the vote system be on the honor system.

It's something that definitely should be implemented sometime, but it's been this way for so long that it hasn't felt super necessary to change, I suppose. I certainly hope people do vote, though. It really helps.

[Neutrol]

It could be that most people indeed vote regularly but as someone that has played here for a fairly long time and after noticing a somewhat slow but steady decline in population, this issue somehow just struck me and made me wonder, what if this is at least partly the cause, what if for a long time many players have just fake-voted (because it is just much easier). Of course it does affect everyone, so you not voting regularly and abusing the votes affects your play-experience in the long run since you have less players to play with. But just to be sure, and to ensure that voting works as it should, I highly recommend that if only possible, improve and implement a system, whatever it may be that ensures proper voting, for example that callback-system you described. It can only be beneficial for the server.

Best wishes!