Army in "Digg Army" Scandal Banished???

Digg Army (Digg Armies) scandal explained.

One slice at a time

Digg profiles of 15 of the top 17 diggers who somehow managed to digg two stories covering "A List Apart" in near-identical sequence showed up as "invalid usernames" on Digg on April 24, 2006.

Bratislava, April 24, 2006 (pizzaseo.com) - SpitF1re, formerly an avid digger, who submitted the two stories that began the controversy no longer appeared to be a digg user. But A List Apart: Community Creators, Secure Your Code! and A List Apart: A More Accessible Map noticed and popularised by ForeverGeek on April 19, 2006 in Digg Army: Right in Line remained (humble hat tip to Wired's Monkey Bites), showing the original submitter (see screenshot of Digg's non-existent profile of SpitF1re).

The 14, many apparently indexed by Google with PR 5 and PR 6 toolbar pagerank (which suggests pages existed for a long time) not too long ago, as Google still cached som of their original profiles (see screenshot of Google's cache of lili's profile).

Luckily, Digg founder Kevin Rose's profile at http://digg.com/users/kevinrose seems to have been spared the apparent carnage along with a few others (such as Amar or BlackFox), in spite of appearing in identical places in the two strange Digg sequences.

One has to wonder where a Steven Levitt-style Freakonomics statistical analysis of recurring Digg patterns along the lines of detecting Chicago school-teacher fraud would lead.

The purged users were SpitF1re, Cataclysm, Elevation, HyperSpeed, Infin1ty, Insomn1a, Lili, Nemsis, Out_Of_Space, Submergence, The_Answ3r, Ultraviolet, Und3rWorld, Lupu and yobonicap.

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