At Best, Inappropriately Expressed Enthusiasm

[howardtayler]

I blogged about the final round of the easily-spoofed Washington Post poll, and I made a mistake. I mentioned that it was easily spoofed.

This was not meant as encouragement to spoof, but apparently it was taken as such. For this I am sorry.

You see, when I blogged at 9:15pm local time, Schlock Mercenary had around 120 votes. Three hours later

Comments

[cymrullewes]

I couldn't decide who to vote for as I have been reading Kevin & Kell about three years longer than I have Schlock. I like Questionable Content too. So I just didn't vote at all.

[jecook]

*shakes head sadly* Some people's children.

On the flip side, I recall having to 'unstuff' a poll for a convention whose web site I ran a few years ago when people would deliberately sign up with sock puppet accounts and multi-vote.

[krenn]

Actually, it's often a good idea to leave the poll as "easily stuffed"; as long as you can tell who was doing the stuffing, you then null out their votes in postprocessing.

If you make it tricky to stuff, then they won't do idiotic things like have the bot stay on the same IP address. As long as the bot isn't moving around, it's really easy to eliminate its votes.

[comatosedreamer]

The problem is what people are seeing now -- as long as the ballot box is so clearly stuffed, people look at the "current results" and see garbage.

I'd wager 95% of the people who vote in this poll won't stick around to find out the final results... they just cast their vote and feel pleased if they see their candidate doing well. So the only thing that matters to them is what the CURRENT result are, not the results after all the falsified results are removed.

[krenn]

I don't know that it'd prevent initial voting, since it's "hard" (not impossible) to see the results without voting, but you're probably correct in that the obvious skew will put off people from coming back.

Although, for me it's giving me the opposite; I'm now more curious about the final outcome because I want to see just how much gets tossed out. :)

[mmol_6453]

Is it possible for a comic author to explicitly request their comic be removed from the running? That rather drives home the point of "Hey, we don't like cheaters either," to both the poll master/audience and to whatever scum unleashed their private botnet.

[howardtayler]

I did that yesterday. No response yet.

[msde]

Heh, the blog at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/ is responding either very slowly or with database errors... penny arcade effect?

I'm more amused at the irony than embarassed. You do realize you just told a bunch of mercenary fans that they would get paid (attorney drone plotline) if they performed a certain action (win the poll)?

I voted once at work and once at home, but nothing like a bot.

[howardtayler]

No, that's just because the Schlock website is broken, and the database is being held together with shoestrings and spit.

ah hah

[rlg]

I had wondered about that. Have to blame the mallinjas.