GlossLip » Is Rick Astley’s Award Going To Be A Victim Of Foul Play?

10/24/2008 (9:04 am)

Is Rick Astley’s Award Going To Be A Victim Of Foul Play?

A while back, I reported that Rick Astley was up for MTV Europe’s Best Act Ever Award as is Tokio Hotel. Well, it seems that people take their Best Act Ever seriously. Long story short…there have been DDOS attacks, allegations of attacks, and providing of tools to attack sites, allegedly all started by a few disgruntled people.

I’m not going to pretend to understand it all, other than people are attempting to use autovoters to get Rick that award. Not sure how I feel about that, but I do like Rick Astley. Go read it all for yourself. They allege they are not cheating and that what they are doing is not against the rules.

[eta: I'm trying to be neutral in this article, since frankly I don't understand any of it]

Of course, this gives me another good opportunity to do this:

Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up
by trashfan

Posted by k
Filed under: Rick Astley

Comments (26)

26 Comments

Hi, we’re not unhappy that Tokio Hotel’s fans are rallying votes for their group, not at all. In fact we even built a voter for them, and they’re more than welcome to use the utilities freely available on the site and we’ve seen them use other autovoting methods in the past.

What we’re unhappy about is that there is the potential for our last few weeks of voting to be thrown out as a result of insistance of TH’s record label because of site attacks which we weren’t apart of, and which I personally spoke out against from the very beginning when I first heard of them.

After these attacks, we suffered similar retaliatory attacks after several Tokio Hotel fansites had called me personally responsible (which is completely untrue)

Now it seems we’re going to suffer punishment for something we played no part in, but I have personally tried to mend relationships between TH and Rick fans (that’s why we specifically built an autovoter for TH) but apparently their idea of peace is to just drag my name through the mud.

We’ve also noticed TH Fan’s attempts at purging any evidence of previously autovoting after we had heard about the meeting between Universal and MTV… it might be a coincidence but its awfully strange to see it happen across multiple fansites almost simultaneously.

Comment by Vote4Rick — October 24, 2008 @ 10:03 am

You’re accusing Tokio Hotel fans of foul play? As far as I know it’s our boards and sites that have been spammed with porn, viruses and shut down due to DDoS attacks. 4chan even shut down the official site for a while.

As far as I know most of us aren’t using any autovoting programs.

Comment by Rarr-kun — October 24, 2008 @ 10:19 am

I’m totally unaffiliated with bestactever, but wanted to add my $0.02.

I’ve been voting for Rick for a few days, and following the threads, blog posts, IRC channel, etc. all over the place, and I haven’t seen any indication of anyone actually involved that people are interested in doing anything but getting Rick to win the award. In fact, quite to the contrary, people are actively discouraging, banning or otherwise getting rid of anyone suggesting any attacks against fans of other bands.

While this movement may have started and been peripherally associated with “Anonymous”, and they’re inherently irreverent and immature, it seems to me like everyone actually involved in this are just doing their best to get Rick his award. This is the sole motivation that I’ve witnessed.

I think it would be really funny to get Rick to win this award, which is my own motivation in taking part, but if I saw any real maliciousness on the part of the organizers or others involved, I’d write off the whole movement in a heartbeat. Playing harmless pranks is one thing (e.g. getting ads for Rick on various TH websites), and is quite funny and in the very spirit of the RickRoll, but anything more than that is just childish. I haven’t seen anything other than a light-hearted competitive spirit.

Sadly, on numerous comment threads, despite countless attempts to explain these things, there have been accusations thrown about, and even when Vote4Rick presented hard evidence, they still refuse to believe him. There’s not much that can be done at that point, except to carry on voting.

Which I will do, in light of all of the above.

Because I’ll never give Rick up, never let Rick down.

Comment by RandomRickVoter — October 24, 2008 @ 10:29 am

I’m not saying your sites haven’t been shut down, I have seen the spam in action. I am saying that I am not the originators of the attacks but it seems several of Tokio Hotel fansite owners have insisted that I am… which is slanderous.

I also have logs of the 2 consecutive days that our site was ddos’d heavily, the first I traced some of the IP addresses which did extreme traffic on our site and some of those resolved to hosting servers which corresponded with TH fansites.

I had commenters on my blog continually insisting that I release this information so that they could wreak havoc, I refused.

The next day my site was attacked again – this time primarily by IP addresses that resolved to open proxies so I wont say it was TH fans, but my thoughts are it was the trolls which (more than likely) attacked the TH sites to try and pressure me into releasing that information.

Again I refused.

I’m not saying I haven’t talked shit through this whole thing, I have – often it has been the end result of being publicly slandered as the mastermind behind these attacks, which for the record I had nothing to do with.

Comment by Vote4Rick — October 24, 2008 @ 10:32 am

Oh and…

inb4mastermind

Comment by Vote4Rick — October 24, 2008 @ 10:39 am

No, I’m not accusing anyone of anything…because, honestly, I don’t understand it all. I don’t know where it started, where it will end, or what the outcome will be. I’m just a Rick Astley fan, saw a Rick Astley story, and tried to put out the info so others could make up their own minds. I did a little editing of the original article because I can see where people might have gotten the wrong idea.

Comment by k — October 24, 2008 @ 1:17 pm

Yeah , I agree , Noone talks shit as smooth as vote4rick . Why he could sell a ditch digger dirt !

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 24, 2008 @ 11:30 pm

Tokio Hotel fans could give one FLYING FUCK about what Vote4Rick (the liar) is doing or saying. We don’t need stinking autovoters. We don’t hack and crash other people’s sites and yes, we have our logs of the chats that Vote4Rick was in where people were discussing which Tokio Hotel sites to attack. NOT ONCE DID HE EVER SAY TO STOP IT, in fact, he appeared to enjoy it enormously.

The only reason V4R is trying to get TH fans to use their “gift autovoter” is they want to be able to tell Universal, who is talking to MTV about V4R’s cheating, that Tokio Hotel fans are using one as well. Luckily for us, V4R is used to hanging around 4Channers and the only people who are stupid enough to believe him are very few. Probably about 5 people. Sure, he will say 138 people downloaded the autovoter. 138 that he will claim are TH fans. Yeah. There are MILLIONS of TH fans, so his impact has been about like a raindrop falling into the ocean.

Comment by LMAO — October 25, 2008 @ 6:10 am

LMAO I respect your opinion as another human being and whilst I don’t aggree with what you are saying I must respect it as simply being your own view on the situation.

Comment by j — October 25, 2008 @ 9:51 am

Ahh wahat am I saying, you’re a fuking idiot. Go die in a fire emo scum.

Comment by j — October 25, 2008 @ 9:52 am

Oh! I see vote4rick has friends here, you can tell they sounds just like him , only at least he can spell .
He has his own PR staff , ya know !

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 25, 2008 @ 11:33 am

Or you could realize that there is little that can be done to combat immature outsiders, thus perhaps granting a bit of credibility to his point that he didn’t participate in any attacks…?

Welcome to the Internets.

Comment by RandomRickVoter — October 25, 2008 @ 11:37 am

hey vote4rick ,
YOU said :

“I wont bother posting anymore on these forums (or reading them). It’s quite clear I’m not welcome. ”
(aww you poor baby !)
So why do you keep signing in , you’er NOT posting and you’er NOT reading so why are you still there when you know you’er not welcome ??? HUH ???

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 25, 2008 @ 11:41 am

ya see folks vote4rick was the new star of the forum , oh he was so smooth , he was everybodys fav. But then his lies caught up to him and even his prepared statements couldn’t cover them up , people got sick of hearing them . People started asking him questions he couldn’t answer , he just talked and talked but no answers. By then most of his “posts” were ” oh poor me , nobody likes me , oh Iv done so much and I get treated so bad ”
He’s a real cry baby when he gets caught lieing , wants to turn it all around to how badly he’s been treated , but the truth is noone likes to be lied to !

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 25, 2008 @ 11:53 am

Emo faggots are just butthurt their shitty band is going to lose.

Comment by a — October 25, 2008 @ 12:32 pm

Hi sayitout, actually I’m keeping an eye on the things that have been said about me, particularly by you and tgaila.

Judging by the style in which you type things out I am guessing you are mystica on the forums – I actually did answer you.. you just completely refused to believe what I wrote and wrote, I quote “the lady doth protest too much methinks”

So since you’re quoting Hamlet, allow me to quote King Lear.

“Mend your speech a little, lest it may mar your fortunes.”

and perhaps..

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Are we done with the Shakesperian wordplay?

Just because you’re not interested in the truth, doesn’t make it any less truthful.

Comment by Vote4Rick — October 25, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

Guys…

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Vote moar, troll less.

Comment by RandomRickVoter — October 25, 2008 @ 12:58 pm

That was to #10 and #15, btw.

Comment by RandomRickVoter — October 25, 2008 @ 1:00 pm

Fail trolls are utter fail.

If you can even call them trolls. They give themselves away in their first sentences. Why don’t you idiots go back to Forumwarz?

Comment by Anon — October 25, 2008 @ 2:08 pm

LOL !! LOL !!!!
You really are stupid Vote4Rick !!! Which forum are YOU talking about ?? How many did you piss off ???
LOL !!! LOL !!!!

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 25, 2008 @ 6:42 pm

Hey #15 ,
I’m not emo , I’m not voting for any band .
I voted for Rick Astley . I’d love to see Mr. Astley win this award . But do I want a slimeball like vote4rick be something associated with Mr. Astley , HELL NO ! Mr. Astley has always had a clean and wholesome image , it’s one of the things we fans love about him . Read the headline at the top of this story , vote4rick is already soiling a good man . A performer who really does deserve this award . He can never really take any pride in winning it because of the dirty tactics used in “getting it for him” , the fighting , the finger pointing . This is only going to look bad for Mr. Astley . But vote4rick and anonymous dont give a shit about any of that , or Mr. Astley himslef . As long as the award is given for Mr.Astleys hit “Never gonna give you up” , (the song anonymous has taken as their anthem) wins , THEY WIN ! And that is what vote4rick is all about . And he does not care what he has to do or say to make it all happen .

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 25, 2008 @ 9:20 pm

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second here. If Rick himself said that he thought his nomination was a joke, then the whole concept of the “Best Act Ever” category is already declared a farce, and it should be given to the most farcical nominated artist there: Rick Astley.

Who more appropraite to win a joke category? MTV must be LOVING this.

I’m voting Astley, by the way. I hate U2’s “I give to charity so I’m better than you” attitude, I’m not a massive Green Day fan, Britney and Christina I just plain don’t like, and as for Tokio Hotel, I don’t like their music (my garlfriend at the time tried to get me into them and I just plain didn’t like their music). Whatever about their image, I don’t care. That leaves Astley. Logical choice really.

Comment by jayc4life — October 26, 2008 @ 12:15 pm

Thats just it Rick Astleys real fans dont want him to be a joke ! Dont you get that ? We’d like him to win because he IS the best act ever . Not because of bunch of jerks running around in masks harassing people with his song !

Comment by sayitoutloud — October 26, 2008 @ 8:45 pm

OMG! Tokio Hotel rock, seriously deserve to win.
There music is one of a kind.
Astley just sounds like he came out from a bin!
GO TH! I mean his songs just really arn’t my thing.
No offense.

GO BILL! GO TOM! GO GUSTAV! GO GEORG! GO TH!

Comment by Don'tdoit! — October 30, 2008 @ 1:23 pm