[mthsmith]

Hello fellow CrackBerry members,

I need your opinion on the recent FlyCraft contest that recently ended.

As some of you may know, I was one of the top seeded submissions to win the contest up until the last few days, at which point a new submission appeared that gained about 56 votes in a single day, submitted from the game developer (Harry Kalogirou) using his YouTube account harkal. Not knowing whether this was a demo submission, I commented on the main page and submission (screenshots attached) to ask whether this was a valid submission, with Harry confirming that it was, and Thanasis Papapostolou claiming ownership for it.

Over the next few days, my vote count steadily rose, until the final day where Thanasis had 65 votes and by good fortune I received a total of 72 votes by the contest end at 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (0:00 UTC), with Thanasis in second place. I took screenshots at this point to post on my Facebook to recognise my winning submission. ATTACH=CONFIG]188036[/ATTACH]

Checking back a few hours later I was most surprised to see that my vote count was now 65 and Thanasis now had 69 votes. I posted on my video asking why the vote count had decreased as well as on the main FlyCraft page to question if this was due to a system glitch.

Harry now began emailing me, for your reference, below is the conversation between us.

As fellow BlackBerry users, I would love to hear your thoughts. Note with respect as you will notice in the screenshots, after voting, there was no Unvote option or button. Specifically have I done anything wrong here in querying the status of my submission?

Thanks.
Gary M

PS if you search for Kalogirou and Papapostolou, an interesting search result comes up

---
Charilaos Kalogirou <[email protected]>
Jul 29 (3 days ago)

to me
Hello Gary,

congratulations on the position you acquired in the championship. I am currently in the process of checking out the votes, mainly because of your problems with the procedures. I have found lots of accounts that voted for you like this:

https://www.facebook.com/lyuba.aldakova
https://www.facebook.com/tatyana.vasnetsova

only showing you 2 but there are more. Still checking votes from last night but there is a pattern. Can you please provide some explanation on this?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Harry Kalogirou
---
Gary
Jul 29 (3 days ago)

to Charilaos
Hello Harry / Charilaos,

I have no problems with the procedures, I am only questioning if the numbers I saw when the contest ended were valid. When I checked at 8 pm EDT (12 am UTC), my submission showed 72 votes compared to the 69 votes your friend Thanasis P had. However when I checked a few hours later, my vote count was down to 65 votes, hence my concern.

In regard to your query about the other Facebook accounts, I don't recognise the names but I had requested a number of friends to get their friends to visit the site and vote for me if they liked my submission, I can only assume that they were successful in getting me votes and therefore those are the friends/family of my work friends.

If it helps you with verification, I can provide you with a list of my direct friends who confirmed they voted in the competition.

Can't wait for the good news about my win!

Best regards,
Gary
---

Charilaos Kalogirou
Jul 29 (3 days ago)

to me
Hello again,

the votes has been counted and the final vote count you had at the time the competition ended was 65 (remember that people can unvote). I have gone through all the votes for your flight and for Thanasis, cross-referencing IP addresses, timestamps and manually checking the FaceBook profiles, and a lot of votes on your flight are frauded votes. These votes normally would be disqualified and be removed, but since you come second anyway I leave it as it is. Also using frauded votes should mean the disqualification of the entry also. But trying to be fare here I am not disqualifying your entry to the championship as without further crossreference of the IPs with your access IPs can't connect you to this, as its true that someone of your friend/family might have initialized this. Having said this I would like to kindly ask you to not leave comments on the page that damage the credibility of the competition, the game and me as a person. I try very hard to run this competition, build the game, and be clean, transparent and honest about this as I am in every aspect of my life. Any implied attack on the credibility of the competition will not be tolerated and will be regarded as it insult to me personally. If you continue to believe that you have been unfairly placed in the second position, I would be happy to officially solve this by further examining all facebook access data with all liabilities of both sided accounted for by official authorities as stated by the agreed upon terms and conditions. I personally consider this matter closed and wish no further continuation.

Let me know of your intentions.

Best regards,
Harry Kalogirou
---
Gary
Jul 30 (2 days ago)

to Charilaos
Hello Harry,

Thank you for your email, my apologies in the delay replying, I work 60 hours a week to pay the bills and get home very late. I believe that English is not your first language and you may have misunderstood my past messages, so I am having this email translated into Greek and then translated back so I may try to ensure that there is no misunderstanding in what I say.

I was very hurt and insulted by your last email and the comments you made in regard to our communications both in public and here over email, so do excuse my words if they are a little emotional.

1. As I earlier intimated, I would be more than happy to provide you with a list of the friends who voted for me (at last count approx 70). I also have screenshots of the final vote tally for my submission at the competition end (20:00 EST aka midnight UTC) showing 72 votes. I do not understand your comment about people being able to unvote as there was no unvote button on the website listed at any point during the competition. You have also not gone into detail how you have validated the votes but instead arbitrarily claim that some profiles were fake and therefore frauded votes.

2. I have reviewed the posts I have made both on the submissions as well as on the main FlyCraft page as well as my email to you. At no point have I made any disparaging remarks, nor indirectly implied collusion by you (other than a joking remark about whether a video posted from your YouTube account with username harkal constituted a valid entry) or questioned the validity of the competition/votes unlike other people e.g. Hammad Al-Shammary ("58 vote in a single day appeared like it was some kinda of magic") or James Clark ("Cheat"). While you may request me not to make such comments, it is highly insulting to me to hear this when I have made no such comments. I think our conversation thus far would garner some very interesting comments if I was to exercise my freedom of speech and have this published in a public forum e.g. n4bb.com etc.

3. Your long diatribe about me posting comments on the page that may damage your reputation and credibility of the competition made me question why you are so insistent that I be quiet when querying what happened in regard to the competition. I am reminded of a quintessential line from Shakespeare "...The lady doth protest too much, methinks..."

Before writing this to you, I took the time to investigate and found to my great surprise that the contest winner, who you chose not to publicly reveal under the guise of Facebook privacy, is none other than your personal friend Thanasis Papapostolou of at least 5 years, the same one who you posted his video using your personal YouTube account (username harkal), and also the same one that Hammad commented had 56 votes appear literally overnight. Also just as interestingly, he and you both live and come from the same town in Greece and have 33 mutual friends, [ so he is definitely not some random stranger who appeared out of the blue. I'm sure any official authorities would agree that this is a highly unusual and even unethical 'winner', given that you his close friend are in charge of verifying and tallying the votes. Would you care to comment on this fact?

Please do not misunderstand me here, I would have gladly accepted that my submission came in second place if the vote counts had not 'magically' changed after the contest closed and you had not chosen to accuse me of making slanderous comments and protesting your innocence when I had never accused you of any tampering with the votes. However now that you have brought doubt upon yourself and made me feel unfairly discriminated against (something that I will not tolerate whatsoever), I would request that a more official route of verification by a third party impartial arbiter e.g. Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com be conducted.

You are a talented developer and have made an amazingly enjoyable game that I was more than happy to pay for and play for hours and hours of fun. You should not see this as a personal attack on you, but rather an opportunity for you to admit any mistakes that you may have made in judgement e.g. allowing a friend an unfair advantage in a contest through exploitation of your personal connection.

Regards,
Gary
---
Charilaos Kalogirou
Jul 30 (2 days ago)

to me

When you vote for someone, the vote buttons becomes an "unvote" one. You press it again and you remove the vote.

Your comments caused me a lot of times to have to go and explain that we are not doing any monkey bussness here. Like for example 70% of the videos in the championship are on my account as if the user does not render the video himself the server will do (depending on available resources) and post it on my account. That does not mean in anyway that if that video wins, I win. I am not going to get into details and repost your insulting comments here. It was a common fact that was noted by many to me, in private conversations.

You can write any comments you like. I never removed or banned anything you said. I just requested that you honor and respect peoples hard work. Just because you are behind your monitor it doesn't mean you can go and diminish peoples work.

Yes Thanasis is a friend of mine. Where is the problem with that? Should all my friends not be allowed to take part? Or you think that I would go an favor one of my friends? There are tens of friends in the championship. I really don't get your point. And all his votes was counted and verified. Trust me. I am above all a fair man. I will be posting all the votes after this ends and I return to my home country as I am abroad right now with limited roamed internet, that I waste on this... As for authorities, they care for the terms and conditions. And terms don't exclude my friends (this never happens anywhere... how do you judge someone a friend?!), and you agree with the terms by entering the champ. You could say "hey this guy allows friends to take part... f**k hims he is unethical I dont take part".

It is no secret that Thanasis won. I just can't announce his name through facebook channels. Read the facebook terms please. It is so bad that you think everything is ill borned....

I told you again. I have all the access logs on file, the votes etc. As my time is limited also (i don't know how much free time you have to enjoy flaming people on the net) if you really think I have tampered with your results come front with evidence and accuse me. Even by looking at the votes you and thanasis have is brighter than day what you did... thankfully you got second and the prize will not be missed by a valid champ entry.

There is no advantage that he had. Where does that come from? I consider the championship not a huge success as the first prize went to a friend of mine, and the third ranked is also a friend of mine! I would love to have this be bigger and give the prize to someone else. That was the point. To have a new fan of the game. A new priest of it. But I can't let anyone I know not take part. Its not possible. Arni Megalo Argi is also a friend of mine, as a matter of fact I baptized his first child. Should I not let him play?

As for all the n4bb threats or crackberry etc. I really don't understand them. This is how I make my living, how I pay the bills. For you its just a game I guess. I see no authority in websites. If you are going to accuse me you better have court valid data. I have, and this is more serious for me that it is obviously for you.

regards,
Harry Kalogirou

[MrRJ]

Wow, all seems a bit suspect. If there is foul play involved, I'm sorry to hear that, but I don't see anything coming of it really. If he's running the competition and he doesn't agree with your 'appeal', he won't do anything.

I didn't enter the competition, but the game is very good. Shame to see this...

Posted via CB10

[SK122387]

I just read through all that.. that guy seems shady as he1l.



Looks like he rigged the contest so his friend could win first place. I don't know how he thinks that ISN'T suspicious. And then his friend wins third place? Way too coincidental.


I think you have every right to think he cheated, because after seeing all the screen shots and everything, it really seems like he did.

Posted via CB10

[greenberry666]

It's possible that most of his customers are his Facebook friends so that, in isolation, isn't necessarily suspicious. But in conjunction with all the other evidence: yes, suspicious.

Posted via CB10

[abass]

Can't believe I read all of that..

Anyways, it's funny that this happened, as the sole reason as to why I did not take part in this competition is because I figured it'd be too easy for the developer to rig it (although I hoped he would not). It's quite curious that 2/3 prize winners happened to be his personal friends when that was a suspicion of mine in the first place..

Quite a shame really, he got all of this buzz over it, and essentially may not even give the prize to his "friend" and instead keep it himself thus just getting free publicity over a very large event. Such a shame, very suspicious..

- Developer of 'Web Design Cheat Sheet' for BB10 (Posted via CB10)

[mthsmith]

Thanks for the all the feedback everyone. I gave up trying to reason with him, this was the last email I received from him. So shocked at how rude and offensive he has been. Karma will sort things out in the end.

Charilaos Kalogirou
Aug 1
to me
Gary you are such a loser man! Not even you had the most uninspired flight, not even you paid for frauded likes and still got second, but I have been looking at the votes, and you said to Thanasis that you voted him, even though you didn't! LOL!!! And to imagine that both Thanasis and even I voted for you! You are such a pitiful pathetic little man with no life at all...

p.s. Thanks for the crackberry post. You doubled my sales today!