Couple of questions about polls

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Couple of questions about polls

dorseyfurcal18
Hi everyone, I was hoping somebody could help me with something on our forum. We are currently running a few "player of the season" polls for different positions on our FIFA pro clubs site. The polls work fine and are a big upgrade from what we used to use, but myself and another admin are becoming quite suspicious of the voting results.

Players from one specific team are destroying everyone else in the polls by such a wide margin that I have to believe something is going on. When people sign up to our forum, they must register with an active and legitimate Xbox 1 gamertag to be added to a group called "members" who can only then see the entire forum including the polls to be able to vote.

I am wondering two things about this situation. One, is it possible for a site administrator to be able to see the exact results of the polls and see which users have been voting in each poll? And two, are you aware of any way that someone could "rig" a vote like this? In the past we had to change from using PinPoll to the Nabble forum's voting because someone from that specific team that is dominating the voting found a way to vote so many extra times it ruined the integrity of the polls.

There's a very small chance that the voting results so far are fair, so we're just wondering how we can look to see what's happening. Any responses would be greatly appreciated.
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Re: Couple of questions about polls

GregChapman
Hi,
dorseyfurcal18 wrote
Players from one specific team are destroying everyone else in the polls by such a wide margin that I have to believe something is going on. When people sign up to our forum, they must register with an active and legitimate Xbox 1 gamertag to be added to a group called "members" who can only then see the entire forum including the polls to be able to vote.
Do any of your administrators run a second user to use as a test user so you can check that your permissions are set so that registered users have no access to the polls?
is it possible for a site administrator to be able to see the exact results of the polls and see which users have been voting
Not as far as I know.
are you aware of any way that someone could "rig" a vote like this?
I am not. If you are a coder I guess you could check the poll macros and see if you can detect any fault in the logic. I don't have those skills!

You could also try setting up an area only accessible to the administrators and use your test users to see if you can break a poll set up as a duplicate of your live polls, as far as permissions for registered users and members go and try everything you can think of to break the polls

Is it possible that only members from the one team have any enthusiasm for voting in polls?
Volunteer Helper - but recommending that users move off the platform!
Once the admin for GregHelp now deleted.
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Re: Couple of questions about polls

dorseyfurcal18
GregChapman wrote
Do any of your administrators run a second user to use as a test user so you can check that your permissions are set so that registered users have no access to the polls?
We do in fact, and it's one of the first things I played with when we set the poll up. We did a poll a few weeks ago that let only managers vote and we were able to use that account to make sure only the managers could see the polls and vote.

GregChapman wrote
You could also try setting up an area only accessible to the administrators and use your test users to see if you can break a poll set up as a duplicate of your live polls, as far as permissions for registered users and members go and try everything you can think of to break the polls
We may try this in fact, thanks for the suggestion.

GregChapman wrote
Is it possible that only members from the one team have any enthusiasm for voting in polls?
It is possible that these people have simply gone around asking for votes, but with the history of the one user whose managed to bypass previous systems and always seems to find loopholes, I just wanted to come here and ask a few things to see if there was a way he could be doing something.

Thanks so much for the response, this will definitely help us. Since I posted yesterday, the votes have slowed down for that team so if they have simply been begging for votes maybe they've used up all the capital they had. I'm hopeful and it seems more likely now that this was probably the case of a few people pushing hard for votes while no one else was really doing the same.

In the end, these polls were just another way for us to recognize the best players on the site, and as an administrator, my #1 goal is to ensure the process is fair and accurate. The polls are open for another week, so hopefully as time goes on more people will find the polls and vote and have a more realistic outcome.

Cheers!