Poll's

[DJoe]

Ive made this suggestion on another forum & I was thinking of making the same suggestion here:

1st Quote:
"I have a suggestion, it would be more affective to have the polls open to the public, not just the members of -----. You need at least 100 people voting for any poll to be affective."

2nd Quote:
"Yeah, but Im pretty sure that the (login) could be seperated from the (voting). You don t see other sites requiring you to login to vote."


Luckly they did make the change.

[lufbra]

Seeing the ammount of members here at CTH, I don't see the logic in opening polls to anyone/everyone, which could potentially start problems.

[Pi rules]

When I used to do some polls on opinions (firewalls, browsers, one for a paper, and one more other one). I wanted to use one for a paper about opinions on Microsoft's business practices, but there were only around 17 votes and I didn't think that was enough to represent a fair portion of members.

That idea may make polls more popular, but they wouldn't be seen that much by people browsing the forums for help.

Edit: Also, couldn't this easily allow one to vote multiple times? I guess someone could always create new usernames, but that would probably get boring real fast.

[uripyores]

I guess someone could always create new usernames, but that would probably get boring real fast.
[cynic mode]Boredom wouldn't put some of them off.[/cynic mode] :rolleyes:

[renegade600]

it would be too easy to cheat in a poll where guests can vote. For a poll to work, there must be some sort of control. Without that control, the results can be made to say anything someone with an agenda wants it to say.

[oracle128]

Well, that, and the polls we have here aren't going to save the world or anything.

[DJoe]

However don't lots of sites place cookies on your computer after the person votes.

The site where I made that suggestion did make the change and you could only vote once.

They use the same forum format as CTH.

[degsy]

The cookie is only there as a user friendly option so you can keep logged in and store a few other aesthetic features.

Everything is stored in the database. You can clear the cookie everytime you have finished viewing the site.

[DJoe]

I understand that polls never save the world, but not enough members voting on these polls. When 100 people vote this gives more of a accurate opinion on what they believe or think. There are more people surfing the web than joining this forum even though the member volume is high. How many people vote for PrimeMinister's or President's, I can say alot more than 100 without polling you. TV stations probably pull in millions of votes not just, 2 or 5 votes. If this doesn't sound logical than, I don't know what is. The fact is the more people that vote, the more the polls have a voice. Now I have nothing against CTH however, I think that would only make sense. Sometimes polls can change the world, a poll can be viewed a suggestion to change something such as Smoking Laws which is a touchy subject and other laws that we all agree on. Percentage does not mean anything until I know how many there were.

Would you believe a poll that had 2 or 5 votes?

Alright so maybe cookies wouldn't work, how about online driver? Shockwave & Flash uses one or are there other options that would do it?
This usually is located in ViewObjects.

[oracle128]

There is absolutely no way to do it which is 100% fullproof. Even electronic voting systems, where both the hardware and software are in a controlled environment, are easily manipulated.

However, by restricting polls to registered members (or moreso, members with a specific post count), you reduce the chances of the poll making any sense. The biggest factor of statistics is not the quantity of the data, but the quality - if you only have so many votes, you can always get more; if you have a million votes, and but a few of them are deliberately incorrect, you've tainted the whole set of data.

[smurfy]

Simply put, any poll is designed to gauge the opinion of a sub-set of individuals. The larger that sub-set is simply reduces the margin of error in the poll.

In the case of polls in forums such as this, they are generally there to gauge the opinion of the members of the forum, not of the internet community as a whole.
When I post a Poll "What's your favourite flavour of Ice Cream?" here at CTH, I don't care what the favourite flavour of ice cream is of members of the dog-lovers forum, I am looking for information on the favourite flavour of members of this forum.
When the poll results are in, then I get not only a percentage distribution of favourite responses but I get an accurate response rate (10 replies/76000 members). If it was an open poll, what's my response rate? 10 replies/6.6 Billion earthlings?... 10 replies/1 Billion internet users(estimated).

If my sub-set sample size is 7 users, 5 responses (80% response rate) would be a reliable sample. If my maximum was 10 users, a response rate of 2 would not be reliable.

p.s. polls is plural, not possessive, don't need a '