Well, I didn't mean this "voting for one another" would be considered as cheating, but that when you start getting a lot of votes, the "top artists" wouldn't like you among themselves and have you labeled as a cheater and have your comic removed. I was happy that my comic finally started taking off with the readership, and it showed in the votes, and then suddenly I got a rude email from the admin saying my comic was removed for cheating. There's nothing you can do to prove you nor your readers were cheating, nobody gives a damn about your comic getting the same amount of votes on other toplists with very different voting systems (which I don't think any robot or whatever people are using to cheat would manage). And with the two artists I knew it was the same.
Both using whatever cheating methods and artists getting suspicious of others cheating is so silly and childish, that's why I don't recommend having anything to do with that community. I just wanted to leave this warning here in case somebody experienced it too, to know that it's not rare.
@kambreapratt Yeah, there's no doubt that some people may use some methods to get votes (I'm no programmer so I can't imagine how it really works), I don't believe there would be thousands of readers willing to vote every day. That's why I find the toplist a waste of time, you either have your readers vote for you every day and be like on 500th place, or get some kind of cheating machine to the to the top group. But people using machines are just fooling themselves, if their comic isn't interesting, people won't read it.
How do you tell a number of votes is higher than pageviews? Some comics don't have counters and some have many mirrors.
What did you blow off? Did you prove that the first 100 were all using machines? How? That's interesting
I'm all for banning comics that cheat with a serious proof, but I'm against banning on mere assumptions or using the excuse "they were cheating" to ban somebody the admins don't like or what.
Anyway, it's good that all banners are showing now, I guess it can be less aggressive now, at the very least
I still do vote for my friends' comics when I stumble upon a voting banner, but I would never put my own comic there.