Re: Your RDBMS Survey ...

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, mycgiserver wrote:

> Hi,
>
> well, actually we noticed that some person voted hundreds of times for ONE
> item (which has to be the PostgreSQL one). That was a single person though,
> not multiple individuals.

Just curious, but how did you determine this? As there is no login
information required to complete the survey ... if based off of IP, why
not setup a database for logging the votes, including the IP of the person
making the vote. Using something like PHP, you could easily save:

REMOTE_ADDR <database>

and if REMOTE_ADDR already exists, don't add another record for it ... so
that now you've restricted voting to be one per IP ...

>
> After noticing that, we removed the this person's votes by removing this
> single group of votes. All other votes are still there, thus the survey is
> still accurate.
>
> This so-called quick survey cannot really be compared to form-based surveys
> in respect to accuracy as the approach of showing the result in advance
> influences the decision of the voter in a significant way, at least in some
> cases. Thus, this survey should primarily present a tendency instead of 100%
> accuracy (which is not possible given the design).
>
> As preventing multiple votes (and that is what caused the problem and
> subsequent vote decrease) is nearly impossible (unless one uses cookies or
> sessions [which would solve the problem partly]) for open surveys, we'll
> most likely move this survey to the user area in order to be able to control
> the accuracy to the full extent. One idea would be presenting the result on
> the front page (as it is currently done) and allowing voting in the user
> area only.
>
> Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
>
> cheers,
>
> mycgiserver team
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy(at)hub(dot)org>
> To: marketing(at)mycgiserver(dot)com <marketing(at)mycgiserver(dot)com>
> Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
> Date: 4. Dez 2000 05:32
> Subject: Your RDBMS Survey ...
>
>
> >
> >A couple of days ago, one of our brethren noticed and pointed us to your
> >survey asking which RDBMS we prefered/were using ... pride in our choice
> >prompted alot of us to pop over to your site and register our vote
> >... when I put mine in, the results were at something like 1461 for PgSQL
> >and now they are down to 510 ...
> >
> >one of our brethren has seen it be reset back to 450 at least twice so far
> >...
> >
> >I'm curious ... is this survey supposed to have any accuracy to it, or are
> >the results fixed? *raised eyebrow*
> >
> >Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick:
> Scrappy
> >Systems Administrator @ hub.org
> >primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary:
> scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org
> >
>
>

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org