A few observations about the polls on this site
by Volker Weber
When I set out to create the poll scripts here on vowe's magic flying circus as my Xmas project, I was a little bit wary how this would turn out. So my first poll was to find out whether you liked it or not. I did not need to worry. The polls have turned out to a big hit. Here are a few observations:
- Results are very stable. After about 200 votes the results are stable and do not change a lot for the next few hundred votes.
- No ballot stuffing. I was worried people might want to influence the vote by voting many times, which again was unnecessary.
- Very quick results. Within 24 hours you see more than 200 votes.
- Only one in twenty votes. I am seeing at least 5000 different IPs every day, but only a fraction of those visitors vote.
I have been getting a few suggestions, like providing a Submit button or a View Results link. Thank you for that, but I have actually designed it this way for a reason. If there is an opportunity to look at results, I sometimes cheat and look at them before voting myself. I don't know why I do that , but it probably influences my choice.
I have made one small adjustment yesterday, after one reader told me he could only see the results by voting again. Here is how it should work: You vote, the site sets a cookie. If there is a cookie, you get to see the results (for one year) instead of the choices. Now I check if I can successfully set a cookie, and if I can't then I present you with the results directly. Which of course means that you don't get to vote if your browser does not accept the cookie.
I know some people don't like to accept cookies, but I find them tasty to preserve state between sessions. Without them you are forced to enter your contact data in the comments all over again. This is my setting in Safari:
Comments
I like "only from sites you navigate to". Is there an equivalent feature in Firefox?
My reason for not voting: the company's content filter blocks parts of the javascript, breaking the voting click action.
Chris, I am not aware of any such feature in FF.
You may want to read this review of a cookie whitelisting extension to FF.
The UI for this feature has been removed in FF2. You can go to about:config and set network.cookie.cookieBehavior to 1.
I'm just glad that only 5% of your voting/readers are still on Notes R5 or 6.0.x. And that Notes has 75% market share. :-D
I am using CookieSafe to whitelist sites - works very well for me.
I'm using three different browsers (Opera, IE and Firefox) from two different PCs (home and business) to access your blog. Is there any way to avoid to use a poll twice? This would need to see it without participating in it (e.g. set the cookie but don't increase the count with the second, third, ... time I access the blog)!
Please don't tell me only to use a single MAC to access your blog ;-).
You should really use a single Mac. :-)
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