...despite referrer votes showing otherwise.

1. uscwannabe - referrer votes: 287
2. dustin@rebelscum.com - referrer votes: 183

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http://www.starwars.com/hyperspace/about/news/news20060710.html

Meet the New Fan Club President!
July 10, 2006

The results are in and Dustin Roberts has been named the new President of Hyperspace: The Official Star Wars Fan Club.

Dustin will be given a guest editor position for an upcoming issue of Star Wars Insider magazine, as well as a personal profile printed in Star Wars Insider. He'll also join the ranks of the VIPs on starwars.com blogs and message boards, and will receive a Star Wars collectibles gift package and more.

Roberts, 33, lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. Always a huge fan of the original Star Wars trilogy, his love of the toys and collecting habits were rekindled in 1995 when he started to see Star Wars action figures in stores again, manufactured by Kenner. Dustin's contributions to the online Star Wars community include involvement with many prominent fan-based websites including: Yakface.com, Nerf-herder.com, Rebelscum.com, TheForce.net, R2D2central.com, and even a brief stint at the official website as a collecting forum moderator. Nowadays, Dustin concentrates on collecting news coverage for both Rebelscum and TheForce.net, while also continually updating his ever-growing R2-D2 collection focus at R2D2central.com.

Roberts will soon be jetting his way to sunny San Diego to attend Comic-Con International on behalf of the Star Wars Fan Club. As always, Hyperspace will be providing exclusive coverage from the convention, including audio and video coverage of the event not available elsewhere.

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GOOGLE CACHE OF THE LEADERBOARD: http://tinyurl.com/pk76v

Did that "uscwannabe" guy pull out or something?

No. "uscwannabe" is taking LFL to court over this.

RebelScum.com and TheForce.net which are owned and run by PhilipWise's CollectingHQ.com fielded "Dustin Roberts" and promoted the hell out of Dustin's candidacy on the TFN frontpage. In fact most of the TFN frontpage "news" from the past few months involved promoting Dustin Roberts for HyperSpace prez, thus shutting out the little guy.

When you renew your hyperspace account, you put in a candidate's referrer code and that is the vote. From what I hear this "uscwannabe" allegedly bought hyperspace memberships and used his own referrer code.

The thing is whether or not this uscwannabe played dirty is not the point. RebelScum.com-TheForce.net aka CollectingHQ.com are monster sites and promoted this Dustin Roberts for months. There is no way your average member could have won.

StarWars.com, which is run by ex-TheForce.net staffer Paul "Ghent" Ens, uses TheForce.net to promote StarWars.com paid features.

Riiiight, so it's a giant Circlejerk basically, and this other guy has been completely shut-out.

Bullshit. But then it IS Hyperspace!

Who would really want be "fanclub president" of one of the most unsympathetic movie-megoliths out there?

I'm assuming it pretty much makes TFN more of a "yes-man" for SW.com than it already was?

Looking at those numbers, there's not a hell of alot of new people signing up for Hyper$pace anyways, I'd hazard a guess MF.com in it's "heyday" around Episode 3 time was prolly getting more hits...

Admittedly I never read the fine print, but I fail to see how this is a problem on the surface of things given the nature of the competition.

If he really was paying for multiple hyperspace memberships with his own money to boost his rating I don't see how this is a huge violation. If he wants to spend $2,000.00 on hyperspace memberships I say more power to him. If others wanted to win the contest badly enough they could've done the same thing.

Dustin Roberts winning kinda pisses me off. He's getting major backing from monster sites so it makes in impossible for anyone else to win. The only way for a "little guy" to win is to do what uscwannabe did. Pretty sad if you ask me.

Great "contest" LFL!

As pathetic as this is, it's really no big shock. Rebelscum.com forum members were hammering Dustin and Philip Wise over this, using accurate terms like "Well whoring out your own apparently worked." Philip went back and forth with several of these posters, and the overall opinion of those participating in the thread was "Well of course Dustin won, he whored out every SW site out there, and usc guy had no chance."

Eventually tiring of the truth being shoved down his throat, Philip deleted all the posts in the thread, created a new one, with one post - his. The link is below.

threads.rebelscum.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=2008893&page=1

I see Philip's public relations skills are as sharp as ever!

TFN's front page was unreadable because of that Dustin guy.

Some interesting discussion/revelation going on here:
http://cgi.x-lentertainment.com/yak1/viewtopic.php?t=347&start=25


Apparently, Philip received a $2 commission for every subscription to Hyperspace with Dustin's referral code on it. Apply that to the 187 referrals Dustin received, and you have $374 in the fat Texas man's wallet.

Add in Dustin's strong ties to OfficialPix, TFN and rebelscum, and those sites' pimping themselves out to SW.com so much in the past couple years, and I think you easily have enough evidence to show the entire process was a farce and a joke from the start.

Philip's continual goal over the past several years has been to personally profit from the popularity of Star Wars. This is another pathetic example of that.

If Dustin has any sense, he'll resign.