I "won" 16 power vote codes on Listia for a bid of 505 points. However, 5 of the codes that I received were missing one or two characters so were unusable (hopefully will be replaced!) and, of the others that I've entered so far, all but one have been worth the minimum of 5 votes and the other was worth 15, which I think is second lowest possible value. I have no idea if the seller of these knew that they were lowball codes (or how they could have known this) but, to the skeptic in me it sure seems like that's the case. Since I got the Listia points for free, this was, technically, a winning proposition. However, once you've used your free points that you get for opening an account, you either have to sell something or buy points to get enough of them to do anything with. They give you 5-10 points at a time for signing in each day and receiving positive feedback, but it'll take you a long time to accrue 500 that way! So, I have like 12 Listia points left and have no neat ways of increasing that number, so it's not likely that I'll be bidding for Pepsi power vote codes -- or anything else -- again. It'd be really nice if Listia let you transfer points to another user; that way we could pool our points and have one person with a lot of bidding power going to bat for us without potentially competing against other Mickaboo/coo volunteers. However, as far as I can see there's not a way to transfer points, at least not yet. Mickacoo is currently in 14th place. I'm hopeful that, if we do this again we will find that the whole process is a lot less squirrely without the power vote codes. I appreciate what Pepsi is doing here but we should be rescuing birds and not rummaging through empty soft drink containers looking for numbers. --VH From: discuss-bounces@mickaboo.org [mailto:discuss-bounces@mickaboo.org] On Behalf Of Elizabeth Young Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 9:37 AM To: General mickaboo discussion; MickaCoo@mickaboo.org; Jill Shepard; Janelle; Jennifer Winograd; Gina Farr; Kelle Kacmarcik Subject: [Mickaboo Discuss] *WE'VE FALLEN TO octothorpe15 AND ONLY TOP 15 WILL WIN* PLEASE HELP! *WE'VE FALLEN TO octothorpe15 AND ONLY TOP 15 WILL WIN* PLEASE HELP! Dear MickaCoo Supporter, Thank you for helping MickaCoo compete to win a $10K Pepsi grant by voting for us at http://www.refresheverything.com/mickacoo. You can double your vote by also texting "108445" to 73774 daily. Our current rank is octothorpe15 and we must be in the top 15 to win.