So... apparently the polls are rigged (Patreon)

Okay, so I've noticed something rather suspicious about the way the suggestion box winners are determined. I've been paying attention to the most popular posts at the end of the month and I've found that every time during the last days of the month there would be one suggestion that would suddenly skyrocket out of nowhere to take the top spot and become the winning idea for the month. These particular suggestions we're never that popular prior and I never really knew about them all that much so it did come as a surprise to me when I saw that they suddenly overtook every other suggestion out of nowhere. There were others who noticed this too and I have received complaints about it in private so it seems it's not just me who's aware of it. Initially, I decided to take a wait and see approach to all of this. If this was just a one time thing then I wouldn't consider it too troubling, but the fact that it has been happening consistently across every suggestion box and over the course of multiple months means that it is probably more than a coincidence. It's likely that someone is rigging the polls and messing with the voting system. I don't know who, but it seems like someone is.

I'm assuming that they're using multiple accounts or something in order to mess around with everything. Originally I thought that nobody would go out of their way to do anything like that since there's an upfront charge system in place that would make that too costly to do, but either they've found a way around that or they're just really rich or something. Now that is certainly great for me in a sense but, not to get too political here, as someone who's not at all a fan of money in politics I'm not all that happy about this happening either.

Frankly I don't how I can address this. I don't know how I can find the person who's doing all of this and how many accounts they have and even if I were to confront them, they can just simply lie about it. That's the internet for you I guess. Again, I just want to emphasize that alot of this is speculative and it could very well not be happening at all (so I don't want any of you guys to go around blaming anyone without good grounds). But given what I've been witnessing recently and the comments I've received, if people are unhappy with the exclusive pictures every month possibly because of this then then I can't just ignore it and pretend like it's not happening.

So I've decided to just scrap the whole voting system altogether. It really sucks to have to do this given that the reason why I have this voting system in the first place was because Patreon hammered down on the raffle system of mine cause they considered it gambling. To be honest, I don't know what I am going to replace it with right now. I'm sort of short on ideas for that, but if any of you guys have anything to suggest then I'd be open to hearing it, just so long as it's not anything that's voter or luck based, and can be spread out among the different tiers. Hopefully I'll figure out a replacement by next month. As for this month, I may just decide to do a basic suggestion box and take requests and make some of those pictures exclusive. That is the current system right now, but we'll see where things go from there.

So if you were wondering about why updates have been a bit slow this time around, that is partly why (the other reason is because the exclusive pictures this time were also pretty big). I've also thought about doing the second place pictures this time around over the first place ones, but seeing as I don't know which ones people actually voted for, I decided to just do both this time around for the most part. I am not gonna do this every month. I can imagine some of you guys won't be happy with any of these updates but I hope you understand.