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"Reddit's long anti-spam crusade claimed another victim over the weekend. Links from influential gaming site and digital publisher IGN have been temporarily banned from the social news site for what it calls \"vote cheating\" \u2014 using a group of dummy accounts to upvote links and artificially inflate their popularity.\nIGN is the largest site to receive a ban since The Atlantic, Businessweek and others were locked out in June (Reddit has since allowed both to return). It's another sign that anyone who wants to tap into the honeypot of Reddit traffic \u2014 which topped off at 42 million unique visitors last month \u2014 has got to play by the rules, or face the business end of the site's well-worn banhammer.\nOn Reddit, content lives or dies based on upvotes, and a large number of early votes can have a huge effect on a post's ultimate success. Democratizing content is at the heart of what makes Reddit special, so the site takes a hardline stance on vote manipulation. Previously, Reddit resorted to banning individual users. But starting in June of this year it began banning entire domains that belonged to repeat offenders.\nCommenting on Reddit and Twitter, IGN representatives claimed the gaming site never used \u201Cvotebots\u201D\u2014a group of dummy accounts controlled by a single external program to upvote certain posts.\n\n\n\nHmmm we definitely don't bot upvotes at IGN, not sure if that's what the ban is for. Will be interesting.\u2014 Frank Fields (@FFMirhi) September 10, 2012\n\n\n\nAssuming that\u2019s true, IGN still could have manipulated votes through manually controlled accounts. Reddit conveniently allows users to sort submissions by domain, meaning that every link to IGN.com is viewable on a single page (reddit.com/domain/ign.com). It\u2019s easy enough for an office-full of employees to head over to that page a few times a day and upvote everything they see. Is that what happened at IGN? An IGN representative did not reply to a request for comment by time of publication, and Reddit staff do not comment on individual bans.\nThe good news for IGN? Reddit\u2019s bans are temporary. The site is less interested in punishment than it is in forcing publishers to play by its rules. In the case of The Atlantic\u00A0and\u00A0Businessweek, the bans were essentially a lesson and a warning\u2014most of the domains that were kicked off the site in June returned a few weeks later, apparently after promising to play fair.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Pop Culture Geek\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/09/10/reddit-bans-ign/>