Hello Everyone.
I just wanted to offer a HUGE thank you from both myself and Jon Dragonette, who's contest i posted about yesterday.

Unfortunately, my intentions were misconstrued and tarnished Jon's image within the admin department of that website as I was accused of helping Jon cheat because there is "no possible way Jon could have got that many votes without cheating". Jon bowed out of the contest after numerous attacks from the admin department and from other contestants pointing the admin department to ME. Jon feels strongly enough about the situation in Laos and his project that he would rather not have that VISION tarnished, regardless if he won, by people accusing him of cheating to get to pursue his dream. Jon can actually say it better than me, so here is Jon:

"This is where I bow out. This competition was never about me, but the idea I really wanted the world to recognize. It seems that this has turned into more of a popularity contest, and less of an outlet for people to pursue their dreams. I don’t need the help of a big corporation to pursue this project, although I saw this contest as an opportunity that would help me to get a head start on a project that I believe in. I really appreciate the positive feed back and help from all my friends and family who voted for me. However, I feel that it is best for me to bow out of the competition as I just cant have this idea dragged through the gutter because people are angry. I don't want my dream assignment to be attached to anything less sincere than was originally intended. I am still going to continue to work hard to support this cause and make it to Laos eventually.

Thank you again to everyone for your support and especially my wife who I know will continue to pursue this assignment with me. I know that even though I did not complete this competition, I hope that I have at the very least opened your eyes towards the situation in Laos.

Best of luck to everyone out there who aims to make a change in the lives of those who are in need.

_-Jon Dragonette"

There are things I understand about the outrage of the other competitors/admins and things I don't.
First off, Jon had NOTHING to do with me campaigning for him. I simply got his email saying that he was a part of it and asking his friends for support. I read about his project, and i thought "Holy shit, this is amazing, I want to try to help as much as i can." I had no idea the positive (but ultimately negative) effect that my campaigning would have.
I agree, when I phrased my excited encouragement in my blog post as "already voted yesterday? re-register with a different email and re-vote! i DID!" i was naively encouraging spam. However, Jon got an UNCANNY amount of votes yesterday, and yes, i would imagine that there were a COUPLE of re-casted votes, but in every one of these "vote for me" contests, the CONTESTANTS' sole purpose is to USE their RESOURCES to GET FUCKING VOTES. So let's take a look at what I (only ONE of Jon's resources) DID TO HELP POINT PEOPLE TO THE WEBSITE:

I posted it on my numerous blogs, including my website, my MySpace (30,000 friends), Twitter, Facebook, Upper Playground's blog, DeviantArt (3500 subscribers), my clothing company's newsletter (2900 subscribers), my personal email list, and the front page of one of the most popular web-comic sites, Snafu-Comics. On top of that, I encouraged everyone I sent it to to also post it on their blogs, etc. I did all of this in ONE DAY. Hell, Snafu-Comics ALONE is ranked 14,091 on ALEXA (the leading web "ranking site which means out of the millions of websites there are, only 14,000 of them are more popular than Snafu) versus the contest's shitty website being ranked down at 111,358.
So, to all you whiners who think there was "something shady going on" when Jon's votes skyrocketed in one day, here is something to think about:
MAYBE the fact that in ONE day, a few hundred thousand people were simply NOTIFIED about Jon's cause, AND this shitty website, and a few HUNDRED of them actually AGREED that Jon's cause was worthwhile enough to vote for??
Jon's "dream" project of going and photographing and helping the villagers in Laos because the United States dropped 2 million tons of mines in the Vietnam war is so fucking amazing, do you honestly think that out of the hundreds of thousands of people that saw this post, that no one would think this is cool enough to vote for??? That's INSULTING both to Jon and to the integrity of the project!
OF COURSE his votes are going to go up! Even if i didn't encourage anyone to vote for him and simply put a link up, his votes STILL would have increased rapidly simply because of statistics.

With that being said, the sole purpose of running a website that is based on USER-GENERATED content and advertisements is to USE their registered users to GET NEW PEOPLE TO THE SITE. These kind of sites, like threadless, or cafe press, etc would not exist if the users DID NOT CREATE CONTENT AND THEN TELL PEOPLE TO GO THERE. That's why these kind of sites can't afford to SHIT on the people, like Jon, that are actively using their site and BRINGING NEW USERS ON BOARD! When you have to register to vote on these sites, and with Jon's votes increasing by 1000, that means that THAT WEBSITE GOT 1,000 NEW REGISTERED USERS in ONE DAY! Nowadays when there is so much oversaturation on the internet, 1,000 new registered users is probably worth 50 grand by itself, so here's Ray Liotta to say something to you: "FUCK YOU, PAY ME.". And I'll pay Jon and send him to Laos, and together we will propose a new "dream" project that will LOWER AWARENESS of this website and the people who fucking whined about him getting votes.

I hate you.

I think it's noble of Jon to bow out, and I understand why he did it, but I think that you fuckers who contributed to his guilt and his withdrawl should learn how to use the internet for things other than complaining. Amazon's got a sale on cribs. Buy one, cry-babies.

Jon is still going to be working on this project regardless, so go check out http://www.dragonettephotography.com/ to both check out his work and to further support his dream project.

Sincerely,
Jon's Friend
Alex Pardee
zerofriends.com

That's fucking low. -_-
buttwipes and crybabies all of them!

OMFG!

I just cannot believe this fuckers, i mean c'mon! just cause hes winning the contest he HAS to be cheating...

After i voted for jon yesterday i was so freaking happy and now i have to hear this...

You guys suck... (I know they can't hear me but i'm still freaking angry at them)

That's it, I think your post covers everything i could say Alex just let me know what i can do to help

here's my mail santulijf@hotmail.com

-Santi-

what the fuck?

Seriously?!

...

fuck em.

_________________
This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished.

That is such bullshit what they did!

Stupid people, don't they know the power of knowing people
Look at what Patrick Rothfuss did when raising money for Hefier International!

Well I'll still support Jon! Let me know if you need any help!

gloomycookie [AT] hotmail [DOT] com

You know what, I got so mad I wrote to the admins of the competition!

I say we start a letter/email writing campaign to let them know how badly this is going to reflect on them.
Here's my letter :
To Whom It May Concern:
I'm mortified that the admins of this contest and the participants would act the way they did regarding Jon's votes. He is the better person for stepping down after this horrible display!

Maybe he's got those votes because people believe in his idea. I posted to my facebook, myspace, & email list about the contest only, I personally know about 450 people thru jobs, school, family, etc. Word of mouth travels fast and in these times people are looking to support ways to improve our world. Want an example of what the power of the internet is, check out the links in this email.

https://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/do ... =237599167

http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/blog/200 ... tails.html

I'll give you a brief rundown if you don't want to:
Patrick Rothfuss (a writer) for Christmas donates to Heifer International every year. Last year on his blog he said that he would match any donations up to the 25th that were made and people sent a confirmation the donation was made. He decided to give away some of his books signed to a few people that did by holding a lottery (for every $10 dollars donated it would be one entry). A couple of his author friends liked his idea so much they posted a link to his blog and info on what Patrick was doing at various blogs & author websites. The result was $52,793.14 got donated, the last $20,000-$30,000 was donated in the one week before Christmas! So Patrick matched that and $113,466.28 total was donated to Heifer International. That's the power of the internet!

You think he cheated?!? Shame on you for being so small minded regarding Jon!
I will personally tell everyone I know how badly you screwed this up. So congrats on turning your competition into negative publicity.


Truly,
Nadine Fagan

So wow talk about a fast response!

"Nadine,

We at Dream Assignment never accused Jon of cheating. We saw in print,
Jon's friend Alex asking them to cheat and vote multiple times on our
Web site. We told Jon that we were going to go through his votes and
if we found anyone who voted more than once, we would remove those
votes. We actually have posted responses on Alex's blog as well as
Flickr specifically telling folks that Jon did not cheat and we hope
he stays in the contest."

My reply back:
Ah, so Jon's friend inadvertently did that (I don't believe that anyone would want to jeopardized their friends' chance at such an amazing chance), yes I can understand you being concerned. However, I'd be interested to see how many of those are repeats. Will you be adjusting the total on the website soon? And would you be willing to let people know via email the results of that?
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate that you were willing to send a personal response to my letter.

Truly,
Nadine

THEY REPLIED:
"Yea, Jon's friend did do that. He posted it on his blog until Jon
asked him to take it down. Why don't you actually ask Jon instead of
blaming us for something we had nothing to do with? We are trying to
ensure that the contest is fair."

You know I thought perhaps they'd be cool, but no, they proved to me they aren't willing to listen to anyone but themselves. Notice the no reply to my questions......

That's messed up big time...

_________________

thats messed up man... its not like he PAID people to vote for him ya know they just hatin cuz he has a friend willingly raising awareness of the issue i didnt even know that website exsisted untill yesterday

Sounds like a bunch of sore losers to me. Accusing someone of cheating to get them in trouble is so barbaric.

Oh, this pisses me off so much.
to the point where I finally registered on the forums instead of lurking.

1.) you are not PAYING people to vote.
2.) JON is not paying people to vote.

In the TV show where there are celebrities all vying to be an assistant(I forget what on earth it was, but it was a reality show) to Donald Trump(Maybe it was The Assistant, Celebrity edition)
ANYWAYS
in the show, the first task is running a hotdog stand. Whoever makes more in the end, wins. All the money goes to charity.
The men's team, guess what? every. single. one of them, One of them was the famous guy from Kiss, Richard-something, I think, and he called in every single contact on his cellphone to see if they could come to their hotdog stand and buy a $5,000 or $10,000 or $500 hotdog.
When it came time for the women's team, they didn't call in their contacts until the end of the contest.
They also didn't use their stardom as well, and then Trump bit into the women's team about it, telling them they should use every oppourtunity to win a contest, it wasn't illegal if he didn't explicity say so, etc etc.
All you were doing is doing what you could for a friend. It's not a political machine, no one was going to make loads of cash and sit fat for winning this contest, and no one was going to control an entire country or something absolutely unethical for winning it.
He was just calling attention to something.
And if you ask me, he deserved to win. I've met plenty of diabetics. A lot of them have insulin pumps and are perfectly well-adjusted people, and aren't bothered or constricted by it at all. As sad as it is for people to have to take insulin, it is a treatment.
There is <NO> treatment for landmines, except removal of a limb, and then it's most serious side effect is DEATH. And this is affecting innocent people, through many generations, in a non-industrialized country.
So if you ask me, people dying from something is more important than people living with something.

Just FYI.

-editted

Jon is back in! I can't be happier for him! Good luck and congratulations on your re-entry!

Yeah it's great to see everyone caring so much about such a great cause. Seriously thanks again everyone for voting. And welcome to the forums new peeps.

_________________

Oh those jackasses.

_________________

its sad that you bowed out, but you did it for the right reasons, and i respect that, and its even better that even after what happened you will continue to pursue your dreams, and best of luck to you, i went over some of the other peoples dreams, and alot of them didn't even intend to help any one but them selves, just a shelfish ploy to see the world and take pictures of things they can already see on google

Whoo Hoo!
They publicly stated that all of Jon's votes were correct and not fraudulent!!!

Check it out:

http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-latest/

And I just checked out Jon's page up to 1039!

Right on, I'm so very glad for Jon that so many support his idea!

, "alex pardee says to people to vote twice", okay, he say "if you already vote, i just can be forever grateful for helping my friend and the only way i see you can show me you vote is to vote again". He do not say something like "spam hotmail with creation of new mail only to vote fifty time for my friend!"

And like the other contestant has NOBODY in their family or friend who tried to vote twice....this is totally non-sence and bullshit. Every contestant who said he was a cheater should be pushed out of the contest... It's not because he had a LOT of vote in a short time that he IS a cheater. This can be true, but this is not. And the second one has a loooot of vote two so what the fuck.... Anyway, i was so frustrated that i made a account here just to tell you my frustration, haha...

Sorry for my bad english, i'm french =| I hope Jon will win, he deserve it and more than anyone in this stupid contest.