The Guardian gives the green light to multi-voting
March 31st, 2005
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Should Politcalbetting be part of this voting farce?
For five days now we’ve been discouraging individual Politicalbetting supporters from multi-voting in the Guardian Political Blog of the Year contest because we thought that this was wrong and that the paper would take action to stop it.
Since then short-listed sites with a fraction of the user base of Politicalbetting and which attract maybe 1% of the comments that come here have seen dramatic increases in their votes and our relative position has gone down and down from first to fourth place.
Last night the Guardian’s “Backbencher” email bulletin urged readers in a headline to “vote early and vote often” - which suggests that as far as the paper is concerned that multi-voting is acceptable.
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The question is do we join this or not?
For to cast as many votes as you want is very simple. All you do is disable cookies on your browser and you can vote to your heart’s content. With the Mozilla Firefox browser you can disable cookies just for voting by going into “tools”, then “options” then “privacy” and click on the “exception” tab.
With Internet Explorer you go into “tools then “options” then “privacy” and finally “advanced” to get to the cookie setting.
But should we go down this road? What do you think?
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Be thankful that the Guardian is not running the General Election!
Mike Smithson
MessageSpace Advertising
I must admit that I did find it extremely suspicious that some little-read blogs were ahead of PoliticalBetting.com
As far as I am aware, you are the most commented-on, and linked-to site in UK politics.
These contests are a load of rubbish anyway. I read tons of Scottish and English political blogs all the time, and most of them (with the honourable exception of your site) are far more informative, and better written, than the Guardian shortlist.
Its just incredible. How could one nominee go from 2% to 25% in 2 days? Its not realistic.
I have already emailed to ask the Guardian to track the IP addresses of voters - a simple thing for them to do - and discard the IP addresses that register multiple times.
It does make the whole thing a bit of a farce.
I have never understood why I don’t get many comments on my site - I assume it because I take the piss rather than pose intelligent questions for debate. Jokes don’t get commented on.
Currently my site gets about 1500 hits a day (advertisers note) before being shortlisted it got 500 - 1000 hits a day. I suspect that the Adam Smith Institute gets a lot more than that, yet polls 4%, so go figure…
Perhaps Guardian readers logged into these sites for the first time and are voting on which they like best. The funny ones seem to be doing well which is to be expected if the voting is based on one quick visit.
Guido 3. IP addresses are not a safefuard either and it would be enitrely possible to write a short program that does massive multi-voting and produce a different IP address for each one.
The great thing for the Guardian is that multi-voting that boosts its hits and potential advertising revenue.
……And of course Recess Monkey is a leftish political site whereas this one is on the right.
Guido - I like your blog but I’d visit it more routinely if it had an RSS feed I could view through Bloglines. Ask your techies!
5 - Roger, I don’t think you’re comparing like with like. You’re juxtaposing a leftish editorial stance there with a preponderance (though not an overwhelming one, I don’t think) of rightish comments here.
2- Guido, I assume you don’t get many comments because you have to go through a process of ‘registering’ in order to do it.
I was thinking about choice of stories BV. Not the comments. Though I don’t mean it as a complaint. I prefer a site with a rightish leaning stance. It attracts rightish leaning comments. Not all by any means but it’s more interesting than just reading stuff I could have written myself.
10 - Fair enough. Never seen it that way myself, but I guess I look at it from a different point on the spectrum.
Mike—this is one competion you definitely don’t want (or need) to win. I haven’t (won’t ) voted for your site—come on, its a Graudian contest. If they think that voting is the best way of determining the quality/popularity of the respective websites….And if anybody reckons that what the Gruaniad prints is significant, well, he is capable of believing Blair always tells the truth, or there is no corruption in the EU.
Look what happens to the ‘company of the year’ in the various categories 5 years down the road.
Dear Guido,
Thoroughly good read your site is very well informed to. If you don’t win well it is only the Guardian. I suppose my support is the kiss of death, though.
Re [8]: yes, I’m not prepared to register with Guido’s host, either. Sorry mate, you need to change hosts. Talk to your mate the Monkey or even the Honourable Fiend.
Mike, I suggest you ask the Grauniad to withdraw this site from their competition - after all, as a Lib Dem, you believe in “fair votes”, don’t you
I’m not going to switch from blogger for two reasons :-
Its anonymous and so am I.
It can handle any amount of traffic (its Google owned).
.7 You can subscribe via Bloglines, click on the box in the right-hand column which says [Sub bloglines].
Or using this link:
http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/
14 - there’s nothing wrong with that (and the registration process doesn’t exactly force you to reveal any personal details!). I suppose it helps against spam, but it’s just the reason you don’t get many comments.
Are you sure multi-voting works? I wanted to vote for the three sites I sometimes read - this one, Guido and Adam Smith.
Thing is, the total number of votes cast did not go up by three. It did go up after the first two, but after the third vote, it dropped back down to where it started from. Are the Guardian discarding multiple votes, from the same IP address, if cast in too short a time period?
Hang on a minute! Surely it is a Labour backbencher who is responsible for all this, rather than the Guardian as such?
So why is everybody being so surprised? It´s just par for the course.
15 - thanks Guido, I’ll try it when I get home. For some reason I hadn’t been getting the little orange box in my Firefox window that usually tells me there’s an RSS feed I can subscribe to.
I’ve just popped over there - it’s a 3-way tie with pb.com, Guido and the Monkey all on 25% at the moment.
You guys are unbelievable. You are outright accusing me of cheating! I put my early 2% down to the fact that my server initially went down under the weight of referrals from the Guardian so it wasn’t a true reflection of the site’s appeal.
Can I please have some retractions of your most defamatory remarks?
Recess Monkey
http://www.recessmonkey.com
recessmonkey@gmail.com
… one pissed-off monkey
I thought the whole point about the post which started the thread was that it isn’t possible to cheat - multiple voting is being encouraged!
So no retractions necessary
The cheating side of this is by the by - Linking me with Birmingham and impugning my honesty is what got my goat.
Recess Monkey
http://www.recessmonkey.com
recessmonkey@gmail.com
Fair point Recess. Please accept my apologies and I will take out the Birmingham reference
The general point is that it is crazy for the Guardian to be running this vote without any safeguards and then to send an an email encouraging people to multi-vote.
Mike - surely the way for Monkey, Guido and your goodself to reiterate your democratic credentials is for you to withdraw from such a Magabe-style parody of voting. It would have the added benefit of pis*ing off the Grauniad
24. That would be funny.
My son has not been brought up to cheat, however, I do know that I have emailed everyone I know and told them about the competition and the site and asked them to vote for Recess Monkey if they think it’s the best site in the competition.
I just happen to have 17,000 friends in my address book.
Recess Monkey’s Mum
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