The running of polls on HawaiiThreads

[helen]

I'm not sure what grade I'd give them, but I notice that a notice at the bottom of the poll says it's closed. After three votes? I've heard of small sample sizes, but this is ridiculous! ;)

Running polls on HawaiiThreads seems at times kind of strange. On one hand we got over 300 (almost close to 400) registrated users but close to 100 of them never posted a thing and some of them never came back to check things out. On the other hand we seem to have a lot of Guest vistors but they can't vote in the polls.

The biggest sample size I have seen is Ryan's poll about where you have found out about HawaiiThreads and I think is around 26 respondants.

[mel]

I think the polls should be limited to use by just those who are registered here. Even if we open it up, there is no guarantee that the polls will pull in more user votes. I run a weekly poll on the Hawaii Radio & Television Guide website and while I think we don't get as much hits as they do here, the participation level on the poll questions are fairly low.... way less than 100 respondents, mostly less than 50 responses... and this is without any registration.... open to all.

On another note, an open poll also encourages multiple votes as most polls are dependent on the cookies left behind on the user's browser. An anonymous poll will allow the same person to vote over and over again after they clear their cache and toss their cookies from their browsers.

So far I noticed this can't be done with the way polls are set up here.

[helen]

I am not proposing that Guest be allowed to vote. I'm just stating what I notice around here.

[kamlost]

I noticed this is a pretty quiet site. But it's active in an easy going manner. People can double post and not get in trouble. There are mods though. I already had a post edited :(