Cedarlands News

20 July 2008

Un-stuffing the ballot box

Posted by Ivory under: General .

In mid-June, I discovered that a few people had undertaken a campaign of stuffing the ballot box for the simple poll I put together. The original attempt to find out people’s reactions to, and awareness of, the logging became a battle ground. I made note of this in another post ("Stuffing the ballot box "), and have finally gotten around to making some adjustments to the ballots, and implemented a couple new rules for use of the poll.

There was no easy way to purge the excess votes. The best I could come up with was to remove all but the most recent vote from each incoming IP address. Once done, the results looked the image on the left (at least as of July 20th, 2008).

If anybody wants to just view an updated summary of the poll, click here.

Because of the selfishness and childishness of a few, I’ve been forced to put in some rules that will affect us all (ain’t that the way it goes?). Specifically, each IP address can only register a single vote every several days. This means that shared computers, such as what you’d normally find at a home or library, will only be able to vote once a week or so.

In theory, this should not be that much of an impact. People on all sides of the issue are subject to the same set of rules, so it should balance out more or less. Will this stop the abuse? Probably not. There will always be a class of arrogant and obnoxious people who will do their best to shout down everyone else. They believe rules are made for others to follow. So be it.

So…

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