Why You Have to Register to Vote
Posted in Indiana's Favorite Blog Contest on October 23, 2009 by Mike Seidle
Lots of people have asked me why you have to register to vote in Indiana's Favorite Blog contest. There's a simple answer, and the Indiana's Top 50 Blogs contest by Kyle Lacy and Brandswag just illustrated it (BTW - I hope they can get this fixed because it's a disaster for the contestants on Indiana's Top 50 Blogs if it does not get fixed):
Anonymous voting on the internet can easily be cheated, no matter what you do to fix it. When you do an online contest, it's either can be gamed or not. It's not an external issue it's the responsibility of the contest organizer to get it right so contestents aren't jobbed. Last night, Chuck Goose's blog had over 1000 votes. Now it's 289. Or is it? You have to take the time to do things right.
Ok, so why are anonymous internet contests easy to game? Because you only have two ways to prevent multiple votes:
IP Address. Easily defeated by changing IP address.
Cookies. Easily defeated by deleting the cookie or clearing your browser's cookies.
For a developer or system administrator, it's a piece of cake to write a script using wget or php to "autobrowse" and vote. And's it's damn near impossible to detect. I learned my lesson the hard way back in 1999.
So, is requiring registration perfect? No. People can still take a lot of time and set up fake registrations and vote, but it takes a lot of time, and it cuts down on a lot of the problems.
Mike Seidle is an entrepreneuer and founder of Linking Indiana. Mike was born and raised in Muncie and currently lives in Inidianapolis.
Comments
Quite honestly, I was really excited by both contests at first, but since they don't take any other features into consideration, they're kind of just a mini-popularity contest. True popularity is measured by the quality of the posts, the quality of the followers, the volume of followers and subscribers, etc. Polls like this are really BS.
This contest isn't about respect for me or a competition. As far as technology goes, both voting systems are pretty low end - I just learned my lesson about anonymous voting earlier and require registration so cheaters can
a) be identified
b) have their votes nullified
c) be banned or disqualified (if the cheater is in the contest)
Regardless, if this was about popularity alone, you would be running away with the contest. It is difficult to break out of the popularity contest model when you are running a popularity contest.
Also, you can't vote someone down in our poll. You can give them fewer points, but there is no negative point button for votes. So a one star vote actually *helps. You can vote down a comment (that's the little red thumbs down).
Well, first, you can't vote people down. We are picking the top blog based on total points, not on average points per vote. We are making a second award for the blog with the highest average points per vote, who is in the top 60% based on total votes.
The polls and promotion are not irrelevant... I just think the current ranking mechanisms are. Polling and rankings are a tough science!
Totally agree.
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