It was quite a number of years ago that deviantART introduced Favorites and then of course recently that was augmented with Collections.

Now as long as Favorites have been around there have been people trying to exploit them, cheat their way onto the Most Popular listing and make a quick grab at prestige and the easy road to collecting more of those pageviews so many of you treat as the most important reason for being here.

Favorites cheating isn't as common, or as easy, as it used to be.

In the old days "Popuarity" was simply a matter of counting how many Favorites a deviation had so it was a guarantee that if you pumped out a couple of hundred accounts you never intended on ever really using and used them to flood Favorites onto your own deviation you'd be assured a spot on the daily top listing.

Nowadays Most Popular isn't just as simple as counting Favorites; it's a whole complex formula which weighs a bunch of different factors.

This formula is why the daily listings aren't constantly locked up by the same people over and over and it's why insanely popular things which people pour buckets of Favorites on automatically and without thought don't dominate any more.

So the old grind of logging in, browsing, Favoriting, logging out, ad nauseum to a hundred accounts in an attempt to crack the Most Popular list isn't a guaranteed shoe-in anymore but some people are still willing to give it a go and try.

Every three months or so we get a red flag that directs us to someone who wanted more attention or more prestige and who decided the best path was cheating.

The staff here have a large amount of experience investigating cases involving cheating and a good number of community minded individuals out there also notice when it's happening as well so nobody gets away with it for very long.

Ultimately the Favorites system is based upon an honor system which allows works to rise and fall in the rankings based on legitimately granted Favorites and when someone does get caught manipulating the system for personal attention and prestige not only are they cheating and violating our policies against exploiting the system but they are also violating the trust which we place in everyone that you will be a responsible member of the community.

When you demonstrate that you are not here to share in the creative spirit of the community but rather that you are here to seek attention and are willing to do whatever it takes to obtain that attention regardless of whether or not you need to cheat and exploit our systems to get it you can expect to get yourself banned.

So getting yourself banned for some period of time is pretty standard, but what we'd like is some community input on what to do with the deviations and/or entire gallery of the person who just got banned for manipulating the system.

We think that community input is important because ultimately people cheating in this way are betraying the community and I want to give everyone a chance to voice what should be done with the works involved.

I have a Poll here [link] which will be up until 18 September 2009

Vote, give input, pass it around to your friends and give us a sampling of what your opinion is on how we should handle the rare occasion of a deviation cheating it's way into the most popular list.