How votes count

What counts

• One vote per device every 24 hours in the main ranking (per account when you are signed in). The server checks it, not the browser.
• Seasons of 28 days. Season 2 is live: Sep 23 – Oct 20, 2026 (Korea time). The next one starts Oct 21, 2026. All-time totals are kept separately.
• Fandom War: each tap is one defense for your group, and the scoreboard resets at midnight Korea time (KST).
• Questions and comments are moderated and never add votes.

What doesn’t count

• Crawlers and bots (Google’s and Meta’s crawlers and others): blocked on the server since Oct 2, 2026. They get a “not counted” reply and nothing is written.
• Repeat votes from the same device inside the 24-hour window.
• Internal test traffic: our own test sessions are flagged and left out of these counters and of our analytics.

How it works (technical)

1. Request. Each vote is one HTTPS request to our API on Google Cloud Run: POST /api/votes/{groupId} with a device ID (a random UUID created in your browser and kept in local storage) or your account ID when you are signed in. Writes are limited to 15 per minute per IP address.
2. Bot filter. The user agent is matched against known crawlers and the source IP against Google’s official crawler ranges and Meta’s networks. A match gets HTTP 202 “not counted” and nothing is written. Google’s user-triggered fetchers are not blocked: there are real people behind them.
3. 24-hour limit. The server reads the device’s last vote time; under 24 hours it answers HTTP 429 with the next vote time. The check runs again inside the database transaction, so two simultaneous taps cannot both count.
4. One atomic write. A single Firestore transaction adds one to the all-time counter and to the season counter and stores the device’s last vote time: all or nothing.
5. Public counters. Every outcome (counted, refused, blocked) adds to the counters below, per UTC day; counted votes also per hour.

A device is not a person: someone with several devices can vote from each. The ranking measures fan engagement on K-Pop Arena, not a census of every fan.

Stats for nerds

Live from /api/vote-transparency · last 14 days (UTC) · updated 2026-10-11 17:28 UTC

These counters went live on Oct 3, 2026. Days before that show “—” (no data), not zero. “Refused” counts attempts, not people: one device retrying three times adds three. “Counted share” = counted ÷ all vote attempts that day.

When votes arrive (last 7 days, UTC)

Season 2 so far

Counter totals from Oct 3, 2026 (UTC): 8,201 counted, 2,650 refused by the 24-hour limit, 2,753 blocked as bots. “Votes in the ranking” is the season table after corrections.

Polls and small samples

Community polls and the Weekly Challenge show how much a result can be trusted, not just who is ahead:

• Sample size (n) and raw counts next to every percentage.
• 95% confidence interval for each option (Wilson score interval, z = 1.96): the range its share could plausibly take if more fans voted.
• Too early to call while a poll has fewer than 30 votes.
• Statistical tie when the leader’s interval overlaps the runner-up’s.

The main ranking is different: it is not a sample but the exact count of the votes cast on K-Pop Arena under the rules above. Intervals describe how much a small poll could still move; they do not mean votes were miscounted.

Corrections log

1. Oct 2, 2026

   Crawler votes removed from Season 2

   We found that crawlers (mostly Meta's link-preview crawler) were triggering automatic votes from shared vote links. We blocked them and removed 1,747 crawler votes from Season 2.

   1,391 votes came from Meta's link-preview crawler, 354 from other bots identified by their user agent (for example ionbot, TikTokSpider, Baiduspider and Googlebot) and 2 from Meta's network.

   The removal touched 115 groups, in both the Season 2 table and the all-time totals. The values before and after were saved, so the correction is reversible.

   Votes that arrive through Google's user-triggered fetchers are not blocked: they come from real fans using a Google service, and about half of them hit the same device's 24-hour limit.

Data & citation

• Live badge for your site: embed a group’s current fan-vote rank and votes with a link to Arena.
• JSON: https://bestkpopband.com/api/vote-transparency (aggregates only, refreshed every 5 minutes).
• License: CC BY 4.0. You can reuse and republish these numbers if you credit K-Pop Arena (bestkpopband.com).
• How to cite:

K-Pop Arena vote data, methodology v1, accessed Oct 11, 2026. https://bestkpopband.com/methodology

Press and data questions: apps@brainystack.co · Press kit

Videos

Technical walkthrough

Each step a vote goes through on the server, with the real endpoints and live counters. 84 s, no AI footage.

Short explainer