>I am confused as to why there will be a certain
>number of votes on a particular day, for example
>any day in the MIDDLE of the month, and later
>that day the number of votes has decreased by
>sometimes as much as 20 votes. This would
>indicate a malfunctioning script, or manual
>human intervention/editing.

List resets to zero on the last day of every month. This is done to give everyone a chance to get to the top (list is over 2 years old and "old sites" would have had thousands of votes, while the new member will have to start with zero....)

List counts "votes in" not "votes out"

No changes are made to the list during the month.

>It's almost like the server crashes
>and the votes are reverted to the last backup!

This is logical and may happen, however it will not affect the ranking much - it takes seconds to restart the script and unless you have a lot of hits per hour -list "backs up" every hour, you will not notice it at all, because list also updates about every other hour. So if you had 20 hits it will not show less than that. (it is a remotely hosted script and it is said so by provider).

Sometimes member site is caught cheating. In this case we send it back to the end of the list for the first offense and if the site cheats again we delete it without warning! Fare is Fare! This is not the case with your site! You are a good member.

This is a remotely hosted script and at times the auto update does not perform as scheduled, so we also manualy update the list once a day.

So to summise things.

We do not manipulate the list.
We delete cheating sites.
Vote do not decrease during the month unles the member cheats.
We do not explain our "cheater catching" strategies. (it would be stupid, would it?)