On January 1st the logo contest started into its second phase: now it is possible for all TXC users to vote for their favorite icon. We are very excited to see the results. Voting is possible until end of February.

We'd like to express our deepest thanks to all 16 submitters for their 19 submissions to our logo contest. We were stunned by the amazing quality and beauty of the logos. An open source project like TXC depends on the input of its users and we are honored to see how much time they must have spent on their artwork. No doubt, this is a step forward for TXC.

In the following we want to inform our users about an incident regarding the voting:

The voting phase started very well on January 1st. After a few days we found that more than 90 percent of all votes have been casted from duplicated IP addresses. From some IP addresses we received more than 1000 votes. Clearly, something is wrong.

We discussed this in the team and came to the following conclusion: we allow only a single vote per IP address. This may be a disadvantage for TXC users that share computers, are behind the same router, or for any other reason have an IP address that already voted. However, we believe it is the only way to achieve a fair contest.

Technically we achieve this by filtering the voting records in regular intervals. The system will not present an error message to a voter from an already known IP address, but instead record the vote in the database. Our filter script will then remove entries with duplicated IP addresses and keep only the first vote from that IP. Since we run this script only once or twice a day and not after every casted vote, it will happen that the voting numbers on the result page go down after a filtering. Be assured, that we do not manipulate the scores, but rather try everything that this contest is as fair as possible.

Honestly, we find it sad that we have to resort to such measures.

However, we are still very excited about the logo contest and hope that you are too.