:: PLEASE NOTE ::

February 4, 2004: We're sorry, but the ratings content formerly on this page has been discontinued indefinitely due to clear cheating and fraud with respect to the website ratings on astronomyLINKS.

The issue materialized when a website owner noted that they were sinking in the ratings by multiple and malicious entries of "1"s. No website on this index should be a "1", and this continued over more than one day indicating a long-term effort. After presenting their evidence of this problem to me, showing clear manipulation of the ratings results, I was faced with two options:

1. Install a monitoring and logging application that I could cull through for patterns that appeared to be cheating
2. Stop the ratings of websites.

This is a privately run website, currently by ONE guy (who loves it by the way), and I don't have the time to keep track of this problem and "fix" it or monitor ratings, so I opted to stop them altogether. I hope my visitors and webmasters understand this choice to stop the ratings system. One (or more) bad apple(s) has spoiled it for the rest of us.

Thank you and clear skies,
Roger

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