In a few weeks we will again hold our contest to find the best gay-sports group in the world. For those who participated last year, you may remember that a few rogue groups managed to cheat the system and a handful of individuals voted hundreds of times. Now I’m looking for a way to create a poll that disallows that.
Anyone have good ideas on that? It would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
on Feb 10th, 2010 at 4:45 PM
Have you tried SurveyMonkey.com? Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for, or are you asking for a module you can plug into your website? JavaScript? WordPress has some modules here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=survey+or+poll&sort=
I’ve used SurveyMonkey.com in the past with good results if you’re OK going off-site.
on Feb 11th, 2010 at 10:00 AM
SurveyMonkey.com isn’t infallible here either. :\
Really what I think you need is a system that doesn’t auto-publish results as you go so you have a chance to go through the data and eliminate obviously fraudulent votes… finding the algorithm to identify these votes is tougher, of course.
For our model search poll we required a unique e-mail address that did not contain a “+” symbol, but we also tracked a lot more data such as IP address.
Later I could pull up which IP addresses voted more than 5 times (an arbitrary number, but one that works for me) and examine those votes for legitimacy. Schools & large corporations sometimes will come from a single IP.
When looking at results I’d also look not only at who got the most tallied votes, but who got the most tallied votes from distinct IP addresses — a clumsy but still fairly accurate way of gauging actual support.
…anyway, I’m rambling. You get the point. Doing a survey and getting clean data immediately is next-to-impossible, I’ve found it always takes some analysis of the raw data to get to the true numbers.