Sadly, for the first time today I had to ban a photographer and delete all his photos from the site. The photographer was using a simple program to produce fraudulent hits and get them to look like real clicks on his photos. Apparently, fake hits was filling some kind of a gap in his life to boost his ego. Please, save yourself the embarrassment and all the wasted time in processing and uploading all the photos. It will all go down the drain in a matter of minutes. We take this kind of activity very seriously and will not tolerate it one bit.

Please refrain from any kind of activity that will produce extra fraudulent hits on your photos. Be it by human or machine, it does and will stand out, and you will get yourself banned. This goes for photos in the Top Rated Photos section involving photo ratings as well. Adding links to your photos on your own site/blog, or another forum or website is perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with that. Besides, the regular URL link, there are other ways to link to photos, as described here: http://www.airfighters.com/page=photo_links .

Lets keep airfighters.com an honest and equal place for everyone. Thanks for your cooperation.

Cheating for fail click hit points? And why? Maybe because of his ego? I can't understand people like him/her. This was a silly action.

Quote: "Lets keep airfighters.com an honest and equal place for everyone."

Congratulations! One more loser got banned today and all his photos deleted. ::grinning}

All of them I think. If you cheat, Ray will delete.

Not too many this time. Only about 10.

Walter, the same thing happened to me some time ago. I think it most likely happens when someone links your photo to a popular aviation website and then a discussion ensues resulting in lots of hits. Check your detailed statistics, you might find the answer there.
Cheers,
Dave

Sadly, cheating is a part of human nature and although most of our ideal worlds would indeed be honest and equal for all, the format of these photo websites is much about competition and winning and this surely does encourage unsavoury practices. On this site we have "Top of the Last 24 Hours", "Top Rated Photos", "Top 20 Uploaders", and "Most Popular Photographer"; achieving any of these will be an irresistible beacon to the competitive amongst us. I remember my heady days (well, months in fact) of being 'Top Uploader' on Airfighters and although I *never* cheated in any I did upload many old scan photos which perhaps a wiser man might have thought better to have rescanned rather than uploading just to chase that top spot. It is a very big thrill to see your name in lights and to be the 'top dog' here and I know from personal experience that it can become very addictive. Be warned, it isn't worth it!!

On a plus point though, I do much respect Airfighters for not encouraging frivolous forum participation through artifical devices such as 'respect ratings' (easily abused as they are) as on some other photo websites.

Michael