Crunchies Awards Hackable + Gameable?

The Crunchies (an award thingy put on by TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, and Read/Write Web this year) ended their open nomination process last night. But, before that happened, I went back to the site to nominate BricaBox... AGAIN! That's right, I had already nominated BricaBox earlier, meaning I was able to buck the IP + Cookie-based system -- which was supposed to only let you nominate something once -- without even trying. It's true, I never delete my cookies or anything.

Is this how they're going to do the voting part of it too? I feel like something's going to get gamed.

That's why we encourage registration for voting sites, like the Alley 100: People's Choice (that you can't wait to hear me shut up about -- and I can't wait to shut up about) that we powered last month.

When you demand registration you can tie voting actions to a username, so even if you do find gaming going on, it's a relatively simple database process to filter out the bad votes.

With IP and Cookie based voting, there's little you can do to recoup from a vote-bot onslaught.

We'll see how the voting goes.