Controversies in the Internatia Song Contest

During its history, the Internatia Song Contest has been a subject of various scandals and controversies.

The host's disappearance

During the final of ISC 10, everything went smooth until it was nearing the deadline day, when people have noticed that the host of the edition, Jeremy (owner of Bitland at the time), went absent. Many nations' rulers panicked heavily until Shawn, the owner of Lost Islands, stepped up and offered to finish everything as it is by letting everyone send their votes to him and determine the eventual ISC 10 winner eventually. Everything was resolved in the end that way up until one time, about 2 years later, when a user named Karhu showed up and confessed that he was Jeremy, and posted all the ISC 10 scoreboards, including the ones for the final. Since then the official ISC 10 results have been those that Karhu posted, and the ones presented in Lost Islands were the official ones for the 2 years period of "Jeremy's" absence.

Countries not qualifying by mistake

There were numerous occasions of countries not qualifying by mistake and the ISC players not noticing it until the final results are published, whether that was due to another country's votes counted wrong, a country's set of votes miscounted or the host accidentally counting their votes as a separate juror and not an International Jury voter. This is the list of all such occasions:

• Tashkveny 17 - lost their final ticket to Lost Islands because of Spirevo's 12 accidentally being added to themselves and not Tashkveny.
• Territrius 22 - lost their final ticket to Kaledonii because of Anselmsuusonia's 6 points for Territrius were not counted in the Excel spreadsheet.
• Territrius 32 - lost their final ticket to Alexandria because of Chruno's Semifinal 1 IJ vote counted both as an IJ vote and as a regular vote and Edoriada's IJ vote counting as a regular vote instead.
• Eriod 44 - lost their final ticket to Laranjeiras because of Valdron's 12 accidentally being added to themselves and not Eriod.
• Gandhara 67 - lost their final ticket to Alteus because of Grolskira's 8 accidentally being counted to Percheron instead of Porielana. If this was fixed then, Porielana would've been moved from IJ qualification to a regular one, thus throwing out Alteus from the regular qualification zone and making Gandhara the IJ qualifier instead.
• Amsteris 70 - lost their final ticket to Trešlend because of Aurävaan's IJ votes not being counted, despite being sent in one message to the host.

There were also cases of those things occuring but fixed at a later time:

• ISC 20 - the qualifiers announced on show were Lacrea and Carpathia but due to the host counting IJ as a separate voter (like it used to be a rule before additional IJ qualification was made as a rule instead), the qualifiers changed to Kosma and Eriod. Both came from two different semifinals.
• ISC 37 - the qualifiers announced on show were Irdminia and Tashkveny but due to the host counting IJ as a separate voter, the qualifiers changed to Bubblique and Spitzenbergen. Both came from the same semifinal.
• ISC 63 - the qualifier announced on show was Kosma but due to the host making an unspecified mistake, the qualifier changed to Sunetti. The ISC community then had a short voting time to decide whether to let Kosma join the final as the 28th qualifier or not. The majority voted against it, and therefore the number of finalists was kept as it is.

Not voting for a song one hyped

During ISC 20 semifinal results show Chruno did not qualify, but ended up being close to it. Sometime after that, Grolskira's owner posted their non-qualifier votes and then the owner of Chruno, all bittersweet over their NQ, called out Grolskira on not voting them despite having hyped the song numerous times and even having included their entry in their previous NFs. They accused them of doing a similar thing to them for the ISC 28 final.

Votes sent to a wrong account

In the middle of the ISC 57 final, the owner of Gandhara, Browneyed, took off for holidays and appointed another account (Kimmy of Kimmystan) to collect the final votes for him. He ended up presenting the results as normal until 4 nations (Keohretcha, Lost Islands, Porielana and Victoria came forefront about them having voted, but instead having sent votes to Browneyed instead of Kimmy. Since then, a debate occured of whether there's a need to count all of their votes and include them as part of the actual results or not. The majority have voted on the official poll regarding this thing that the ISC 57 results should remain as Kimmy presented them, without all 4 of those nations involved getting a strike.

Late vote acceptance costing a victory

The host nation of ISC 59, Kosma, had informed that the deadlines for voting in the edition would be fairly strict. However, at the end of the ISC 59 final voting, the host nation allowed some countries to vote late afterall. After the results show of the edition, the owner of Lacrea went out to investigate whether the late votes have changed anything based on curiousity, and it have turned out that without the votes of late voters being accepted, Lacrea would have indeed won the edition, and the initial winner nation Kaministiquia would have finished 3rd instead. This was made more suspicious when some of the voters for Lacrea's song said that they couldn't get their votes in. In order to make justice, it was agreed that Lacrea would join Kaministiquia as an automatic qualifier for the ISC 61.

Blatant recap-voting

At the beginning of ISC 65, the host nation Lacrea publicly announced that Spinachia voted strangely too early than the time for all the songs to be listened to would have taken. Deciding that he wanted to find out why, the host nation's owner Lonter simply asked Spinachia's owner about it, and she revealed that it was indeed because of her recap-voting, which is one of the worst ways of listening to the songs of a contest and basing your votes on, and that makes player out as a lazy person who can't even bother to listen to full songs and the ISC players would suffer from it without knowing if they'd have received some points had their song been listened to in full and loved that way. The host got outraged about it and publicly shamed Spinachia's owner PamSwynford for committing such action, as well as ISC players coming in on to mock the situation and the way PamSwynford answered the fatal question by ending her answer with "Problem?", which sounded a bit naively rude in tone. And even when PamSwynford slightly changed the votes, they weren't accepted and Spinachia was disqualified from the edition, allowing absolutely no one to vote for their entry, which was "Shine" by Years & Years.

Confession of not even listening to full songs

During the JISC 33 show, the host nation Bubblique revealed that one of the Waiting List members, Baabutia, has been withdrawn. Later it was revealed that the owner of said country outright told the hosts of JISC 33 that they didn't even listen to full songs, only the snippets of them. With it following almost soon after the Spinachia ISC 65 scandal, the reasons of the removal were kept quiet about until a herd of concerned ISC/OSC players were begging to know the details. As a result the owner of Baabutia, Serduchka, has been permanently removed from the Waiting List.

A similar Spinachian case happened during the OSC 63 semis in which Polland was disqualified (reducing their entry to a nul pointer) for voting strangely too early. This time, it was revealed that the owner of Polland confessed that he also did listen to snippets. As a result, the OSC mods have decided that Polland will receive a strike and thus banned from participating in OSC 63 and OSC 64 - when he will be hosting - but for some reason Polland's hosting rights has to remain.

Triple account gate

On the final day of ISC 85 voting, the moderator and the owner of Territrius, Nicolas, announced publicly that Alteus, Auspikitan and Timivar are banned from ISC and the forum itself due to the fact that the owner of Alteus has in fact controlled Auspikitan's and Timivar's owners' accounts, thus confirming the public suspicion that arose years ago about the possibility of the whole "Alteus clan" being just TheMooCows making different accounts with similar tastes just to vote for himself. Currently it is being debated whether to do something about all the results all those 3 countries contributed to in ISC (including victories of their own) or leave the history as it is. Should "No" win the official poll on that matter, nothing will be done. Should "yes" win, there'll be a second poll where people will be asked what shall be done next.

Many ISC players were all up and arms about detecting on similar cases regarding the fact that some new Waiting List members are usually completely new people with their first post immediately being all about wanting to join the Waiting List. Same about a few of people that are like that joining all at once. But outside of the recent triple account gate, nothing similar has happened before besides the time in ISC 2 where suspicions about Vanessa 99 (owner of Dulcet Ebullience at the time) and Frank (owner of Winterlune) came about them being the same account due to them keeping on exchanging high points in a lot of ESCForum contest they've been to together a short period of time. The whole thing has been demasked as rather that both accounts were two different people, but possibly both being used on one computer, which in forum is pretty much illegal. Since then, Dulcet Ebullience took one edition off and Vanessa 99 kept participating up until her disappearance at the beginning of ISC 40 results show that she had to present as the host of that edition. Afterwards, Kosma's owner Bryon finished off the result show and Frank came back (with a new account this time) to take over Dulcet Ebullience after Vanessa 99 somehow left the forum to continue on with everything. In the end it seems that many people have forgiven both of the people involved in that old case.

Miscellaneous

There's been various other mini and less relevant drama occuring over the years of ISC that included:

• Various countries allowing themselves to send the same artist on the same edition: Shakira in ISC 6 (Sibinia and Anselmsuusonia), Avicii in ISC 13 (Volnytaria and Sunetti), Yao Beina/Bella Yao in ISC 32 (Ruthsina and Leshia), Lisa Hannigan in ISC 35 (Pebbleland and Evergreen Lands), Anne-Marie in ISC 55 (Haven and Caprika), RAYE in ISC 56 (Tashkveny and Bubblique), Miley Cyrus/Ashley O in ISC 85 (Kimmystan and Noxus).
• Pointwhoring (sending a well-placing contest song a person doesn't like just to gain votes or sending a well-placing contest song in general) accusastions (e.g.: Hanzyuki 53 not even being liked by the country's owner apparently and them not giving points to it in OSC 23 when it came 2nd on there for Kimmystan).
• H Kim Jong Il's AD Hangug failing to vote in their ISC 13 semifinal and losing not only their qualification, but also the 1st place in their semi. Similar occasions happened to Yutuland in ISC 26 and Tonallán in ISC 61.
• Pen Island's late votes for their ISC 19 semi being accepted and thus reportedly costing Tjärsklanjska and even Sockistan a qualification.
• Pebbleland's owner's meltdown over Yutuland sending Adelén and them coming 2nd with her in ISC 24.
• H Kim Jong Il's AD Hangug complaining that Luzze stole their ISC 31 entry for ISC 30 and after that one ended up winning, they sent the song with the exact same lyrics to ISC 32 (which Luzze hosted) that could almost count as an uneligible entry for the fact that it's the song from the same universe, although it being a song made by the fan of the Hunger Games franchise after its lyrics were supposedly put in one of the books.
• Sanlyona's owner Gianluca being permanently banned in the middle of the ISC 41 semifinal period for making less than acceptable comments. He was previously accused of biased voting and voting the Kosmallán clan over everything else (which has been toned down in order to not be accused of bias again).
• Pebbleland's owner ragequitting at the end of ISC 49 final voting period and only posting an Excel file of the results, due to all the personal negativity.
• Grolskira's owner accidentally spoiling the winner of ISC 51 before the last scoreboard was presented, after having been responsible for the scoreboards of the evening. Also for taking a break to "clean the floor", which has become a meme on the ISC community.
• Tonallán complaining that they did not win ISC 56 solely because Kosma only gave them 8 points.