someone is giving me negative score to stop me getting score.

Can I ask you why ?

Unreasonable votes is an unfortunate problem on at least the newbie quilts. It has something to do with Google's webcrawlers; I don't understand it, but I've been told by admin that they somehow cast votes sometimes when they run into a tile. Some negative votes might be real, but they come from pass by voters who are not tilers so don't take it personally.

If you're concerned about how these votes will affect your ability to gain access to the main quilt, don't worry too much. Raganaga has been known to invite tilers to the main quilt before their score qualifies them. I'd suggest waiting for more of your tiles to become visible before asking him though. He has also been known to clean up unreasonable negative scores from tiles.

Searching engines such as google has spiders. Spiders are programs to go through links in webpages to find new webs not indexed and add these to the search engine database. The voting system at ice is done with links, so when you go to that link you vote (that is what you do when you click on a vote buttom). So, the google's spider, vote also when searching for new web content...

(for the ice site developers) I think it could be solved with javascript and a post method in the votes, not a get method. If you don't want to use javascript because it is not able in all browsers, you may use a less good looking vote input area and submit buttom by post, so to vote you have to write the vote value. Or maybe doing one of that robots file that search engines understand...

yeh... i know you can put a robots.txt file in the base directory of your website (ie, http://tiles.ice.org/) to tell robots which directories in the site are allowed and which are forbidden. conceivably, you could simply move the voting script to a different directory and then forbid that directory to the robots.

alternatively, slothy could just detect the user agent and ignore all votes that aren't from a browser (assuming the robots don't pretend to be browsers...).

either all that stuff, or those of us on the newbie quilts could suck it up and deal until we make it to the mainquilts, where the voting is protected. :-P