"The most prized avatar on the site, a gorilla, requires 1,000 points," Mr. Dowling writes on his blog. "Currently that’s something that has only been achieved by 4,000 of the sites users, and something that has taken most of them weeks or even months of effort."

Mr. Dowling explains his nefarious scheme in detail--he basically set up a room with fake avatars that did nothing but vote "awesome" on every song--and even posted the code he used on GitHub, so presumably Turntable will crack down on some of the loopholes that allow for this kind of "point farming."

"I went through this process mostly out of curiosity," he writes.