We will soon start the elections of the next five members entering the User Advisory Board, a unique institution of AirlineSim that helps keep our virtual airline simulation world free of cheaters. If you wish to be part of this panel you can hand in your application here. The application phase will end on Thursday the 18th.

The User Advisory Board is intended to be “by the community for the community” to avoid biased decissions by AirlineSim team members and supporters in cases of cheating and general misconduct. If you volunteer to become a member of the board you can ensure that your voice and that of the community as a whole is heard. Further details about the User Advisory Board in general can be found here.

The elections are over and we are happy to welcome the first members of the User Advisory Board. TimS, FabianCR, seppenberger, Notna, BarbulaM1 and vasco will be members for one year (12/2009-11/2010). They will be granted access to the internal forums of the User Advisory Board within the next few days and will play an important role in ensuring that AirlineSim stays a fair game and your favourite airline simulation! Thanks to them for their effort! As you probably noticed there are six new members although only five seats were originally available. This is because BarbulaM1 and vasco received the same amount of votes, so we expanded the board to six seats and the next elections in three months will be reduced to four.

Unfortunately we had a case of voting fraud because of which one candidate was not accepted as a member although he seemingly gathered enough votes. He will also be excluded from all future elections to the board. Since he informed us about this ahead of our own investigations, there won’t be another penalty.

AirlineSim might be a pretty realistic airline simulation, but afterall it is a management game. And games are supposed to be fun. Unfortunately there are always some who take it too seriously and who cause damage to other players for their own benefit. Obviously we are talking about cheaters.

When playing a card game it is easy to define the term “cheating”: Having an ace up your sleeve clearly makes you a cheater. In AirlineSim this is quite a bit more difficult and very much up to personal opinion. Because of this, we cannot let moderators or other team members punish potential cheaters by themselves. There has to be a clearly defined process of filing a complaint, investigating a case, finding an approriate sentence and executing the latter. The community should be involved in this process as a sole team decission will always be biased.

To guarantee the proper employment of such a process we established the socalled User Advisory Board in the German community. Now that the English one has grown to a decent size we also want to introduce the same system here. The first step on the way to a dedicated English-speaking User Advisory Board are the elections to the first five seats on the board. As a player of AirlineSim you should make use of the opportunity to participate in this election to make your voice heard. You can vote for as many of the 13 candidates as you wish HERE.