The Edublog Awards

Institutional voting now not possible

Another day of people deleting cookies and voting hundreds (in one case thousands!) of times has led to us having to limit all polls to one vote per IP.

Unfortunately this means that if you are on a network – as many schools are – which shares an IP address, then you don’t get to vote (if someone else has) until you get home onto your own net connection.

Realistically I guess we should have done this from the start… but heck, you live and learn.

James Farmer

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10 responses to “Institutional voting now not possible”

  1. Abuse is one thing, fair use is another…

    For blogs that are read within institutions at work, say, in the K12, FE or HE communities, vote counts are effectively limited to the number of institutions in that sector, rather than the number of actual subscribers – or readers – a blog has, for example?

    I guess that’s fair enough – after all, we don’t want communication via blogs to become integrated into daily work practice – far better that it’s something you do out of hours, in your own time, at home…

    Maybe you should lock down voting so that it’s only enabled out of work hours (tracking time zones across the globe, of course)?

    As it’s one vote per institution/IP address, I assume that you only allowed one nomination per institution/IP address?

    tony

  2. Gee Tony, thanks for the great suggestions. Assistance like this is really invaluable. Got any other good ideas?

  3. Hmmm – so are you going to post a clarification in the blog entry where you say:

    “Please note that we’ve set the maximum as 50 votes from the one location (as long as it’s an institution – home internet accounts submitting that many votes are being dodgy) as that would seem a reasonable amount of support to garner from your students and peers, and also be in the spirit of things (voting being decided by quality, not quantity).”

    Because presumably that’s no longer true?

  5. Third and final thought…

    If someone votes using their laptop, say, from an institutional IP address, they’ll get a voting cookie, I imagine.

    If they see your announcement about ‘one vote per institution’ and want to count a vote (maybe because their institution is heavily siloed, internal depts refuse to talk to each other, etc.) and they do so from home, the cookie will identify them as having already voted and will presumably discount that second vote?

    So… err… hmmm… what a palaver… 😉

  6. Shock! Horror! Edublog Awards Not Perfect! Exposed by Tony Hirst! Organisers Never to Live Down Shame!

  9. I say let’em rip! That’s life and that’s the Web. We should not twist the web into some kinda form of preconceived “equality”.

    Cheating sucks but it also takes effort/time. Passion. Let’s not kid ourselves that voting in this way is anything BUT a popularity contest. Sorry to let the cat out of the bag.

    The web lives or dies by the button and so should the candidates. However gruesome that is….The people most in need know where the beef is.

    David
    http://eflclassroom.ning.com