Best of 2024
Update on our ranking for the 2024 'Best of the World' category winners
Last week, we concluded our 4th annual 'Best of the Year' awards. It was the most successful edition so far in terms of media coverage and website visits. The relentless work of our team and the exposure it generated was meant to promote so many great new artworks and artists.
Unfortunately, earlier this week, we found that a select few users have engaged in methods to inflate vote counts for certain candidates using means that go against the spirit of our competition. These include using tools to generate temporary random email addresses, and exploiting some of the specifics in how Gmail addresses work to be able to vote multiple times using the same email address. More details about this below.
Once we discovered these inconsistencies, we immediately took action to address them. Today, we've released an updated winners section on the website.
We really regret not having found out these exploitations of our system earlier, and would have liked to take action before the winners were announced. Our team put a massive amount of effort and care into running the awards campaign, and we’re sad to see it being taken advantage of.
What took place
Our awards voting platform already was set up to deal with some common ways people might try to cheat the system.
From the start, we disallowed any email addresses containing '+' characters (to prevent Gmail and Outlook's plus addressing feature from being used to vote multiple times). We also incorporated a list of known email addresses from services that can be used to generate temporary/disposable email addresses.
On Tuesday this week, we found out in a review of the results that there were a large number of votes for several artworks from a few domains (one of them being 'miped.org') which are from known temporary email providers that weren’t in our list of blocked email addresses.
Additionally, we discovered over 20,000 votes that were submitted using email addresses that exploited the ‘dots don’t matter’ functionality of Gmail. This is a feature that allows you to place or omit dots in email addresses, emails to which will all end up with the same user (e.g. johnsmith@gmail.com is equal to john.smith@gmail.com, and jo.hn.sm.ith@gmail.com).
What happens now
We’ve now updated our records to exclude these invalid votes. This has changed the winners of the ‘Best Mural of the World’ category.
The new top 3 in this category are:
We want to give a massive congratulations to Cristóbal Persona and the new top 3, and will highlight their wins on our channels over the next weeks, to give them the recognition they deserve.
We’ve also already updated our system to put in place better checks against these types of vote inflation methods, to ensure that the Best of February 2025 and our future yearly awards won’t be impacted. This includes using a more up-to-date and expansive list of disposable email address providers, putting in place automated alerts for suspicious domains, and more frequent manual checks. We also screened our previous editions and concluded this was the first time it happened.
We very much regret having to correct the situation, but it is the only right thing to do. Street Art Cities is a transparent and fair platform for us all. Despite this setback, we are still heavily committed to building the stage for current and future talents. We keep supporting artists from all over the world. With passion and integrity, and we value everyone who's with us in this mission.
DISCLAIMER: We do not know who has tried to influence the process. We find it hard to believe that nominees revert to this kind of behaviour.
