Yet another gaping Newsvine credibility gap

Soooo, basically with two browsers and a little added software....the polls get slicked. Have you found anything else it can do?

Wow. Interesting article and I had no idea you could do that. I've long suspected there was a problem. In the past, I've noticed spikes in voting with no comment or vote to go along with it. I just chalked it up to someone voting without commenting and figured the polls aren't scientific anyways and I use them to satisfy my own curiosity.

Thanks for pointing this out Rac!

I never noticed. Never put much stock in polls anyway. (they never include me) Except on the Vine.

wrong time stamps on comments
comments appearing in other articles or seeds versus the article/seed you hit the reply button on
comments reordering and renumbering

RAC 0129,

I've never seen any of those things happen. Did you report them as bugs?

I had just been at that page in IE and voted a few days earlier. When I opened it up in Chrome I noticed the poll and lo and behold! I could vote on it .... again!

I don't believe you're actually voting multiple times. It's more likely that your add-on is preventing Newsvine's Javascript from reading the cookies it sets for various things, so it can't tell if you've already voted on a poll or not. That is entirely client side functionality. It needs to do that in order to disable the poll for you and display the results, which is also in Javascript.

It's more likely that when you attempt to vote a second time, Newsvine's javascript can't tell that you already voted because you're intentionally hiding that information from it, while the database will recognize that you already voted -- because it already has that data -- and simply ignores what you're doing with a silent error.

This is easily testable. Create a new story on your column that isn't published to any groups or categories. Don't comment on it so that it won't show up on anyone's tracker. Put a poll in the story, and then try to vote multiple times with the method you think works. Once you're sure that you've voted multiple times, disable the add-on, log out of Newsvine, clear your cache, restart your browser, and then check the page *without* logging back in.

If the vote total equals the votes you believe you cast, then you've discovered a bug. Please report it, and thanks for writing this story.

But I believe it's not a bug because I've observed that Newsvine will eventually "forget" all the stories and seeds you've voted for after a certain length of time has elapsed. If you go into your own archives, to the first stories you wrote or seeds you created, it'll show the voting button and act as if it's letting you vote for it again, even if you've already done that. But the vote total does not increase.

This behavior is consistent with cookies expiring and offers a complete explanation for the behavior you're writing about.

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No one writes valid polls, so why should we expect the people who vote in them are doing so in a valid way?

Brian Ford,

I am, using some Google tools. Not ready for prime time yet though.

Glad someone found the glitch who knows how many trolls know about this feature and what other features are available to torture us. I do know there is a way to alter your IP address so I wonder what this could do.

Do not plan on voting twice nor have I on this site.