How can I resist when they name it THE GOD POLL? There are several questions there: Does god exist (currently tied between yes and no)? Is there life after death (roughly tied, with yes in a slight lead)? Do humans have souls (yes is leading, 50%:34%)? Can an atheist be ethical (Yes is way ahead, fortunately)? Is evolution accurate (yes is at 64%, not bad)?
Vote on ’em all!
I think we have discovered the most pathetic online poll ever. The creator is jacking around the numbers now to whatever he feels like; he has left a comment here to complain; he’s playing a little game of sockpuppetry (“Dorfus” and “tgp” are the same person); and he just sent me email saying, “I’ve asked seed to remove your blog. I hope they do.” Whatta maroon.
Done.
Though I have to say, the current numbers aren’t bad for an unpharyngulated poll.
It would have been SO much more interesting, and ever so much more fun, if they had asked if it were possible to be a Christian and be moral…
no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott
Oh yea baby. That bad boy just BEGS for a votin’ crashin’ lovin’.
Who is this, why are they doing it?
Voted, sent link on MSN to son at uni.
You need to click separately to vote on each question, that’s a bit odd.
Considering all the questions are stated in the declarative, I would have expected more votes for “MAYBE”.
I’d guess most people would just vote based on what they “believe”, and of course the whole point of crashing this is to show how un-scientific these polls are, but still, it makes you wonder what the reasons are for asking these questions.
I went, don’t see how to vote. I’d sure like to….
Now “Maybe” is WAY ahead for the atheist/ethical question. Strange, and strangely annoying.
Surprisingly, ‘maybe’ currently has 91% in the atheist ethics poll.
I guess it’d killed them to specify what they mean by “soul”? I voted ‘no’ on the assumption they’re thinking of the immortal, immaterial variety.
Spiffy animation when you click the vote buttons, eh?
Ooh, great, they have to treat evolution as if it were important to the “God question” in isolation. I’m sure that makes the DI happy, because they count on people simply reacting to “godless evolution.”
So I’ll assume that any legally competent adult answering “No” to the evolution question is dumb, ignorant, dishonest, or some combination thereof.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
People are probably misunderstanding the question. Atheists also can be unethical. Probably people are deciding that being atheist does mandate being ethical, which you and I understood is not the question.
what is a soul?
I saw the poll, tried to vote, but nothing happened. Maybe the problem is I’m using Apple’s Safari browser.
I agree it would have been a good question to ask “if it were possible to be a Christian and be moral.” I would vote “probably not” since most Christians have no problem with abusing their children with Jebus stupidity.
its funny how eveything seems to be skewed to a rational perspective except for the ethical question
51/49%
strange.
There’s something weird going on with this thing.
I am nearly absolutely certain that “Is there life after death” was not at 0 votes for “Yes”, or only 10 votes for “yes” on “Do humans have souls”, when I voted just a few minutes ago. And ditto about the strangely high “maybe” for “Can atheists be ethical”.
I call shenanigans!
Here’s another poll. You get to vote on a replacement for the Koran. Calvin & Hobbes is leading
http://lolkoran.blogspot.com/
“Is Evolution Accurate?”
What the heck is their standard for accuracy? Obviously there are debating points within evolution and it’s not a “finalized” theory.
Interesting that “Is there a God?” is about 50-50 but “Is there an afterlife?” is tilted heavily towards there not being one. So, for a lot of people there’s a God but he sends us to oblivion?
And now “God exists” is 98% “maybe” and 0 “yes”. And evolution is 92% “maybe”
Shenanigans squared!
Owl,
i agree.
It seems everytime i look the numbers are completely different.
Maybe they’re trying to screw with the pharnguloids.
If so they must be punished.
It appears someone is switching votes and/or deleting voted. All of a sudden, god exists is 1% no and 99% maybe and the ethical atheist question only has 16 total votes.
Looks like the agnostics are coming out for this one.
Good question. People only believe in this invisible body part because they were brainwashed to believe it. Apparently only the human ape species has a soul. I think it was invented to support the idea that people are completely separate from the rest of nature. After a human ape drops dead, the invisible soul magically flies up to heaven and then magically transforms itself into the body it came from, except now the human ape is alive, not dead. Even the most moderate Christians believe this childish nonsense, which I why I think all Christians are idiots.
On last check, all the ‘maybe’s for the atheist ethics question are simply gone.
I guess it’s called the God Poll because, like Yahweh, it’s arbitrary and nonsensical?
It’s definitely not keeping track of votes. It’s clearning them out every minute or two, or it’s posting random results. Something even more bogus than usual, anyway.
I think we’ve already managed to break this one… or someone has. Either way, the results are currently nothing as you described them, and a little odd. God’s existence is almost fully Maybe, and Evolution’s almost fully Yes (not only in percentage, but in total votes). Not quite what one would expect, and definitely not what was already reported here.
The vote count seems to change randomly.
Right now, the page shows 2 votes for “no” on God, and 0 for “yes” and “maybe”.
I’m sure it will change again if I reload the page again.
WTF?
I went to another PC, running Win98 & IE6, and was able to vote, but the numbers are screwy, as others have noted. Seems to be well and truly crashed.
I have reloaded the page several times to check the results and each time the results changed. It looks like the results are reset each time I reload.
Maybe God didn’t like our answers?
Present.
I’m not sure this is a real poll either – I wouldn’t be surprised if the “TGP” response in the Comments section is computerised. It’s so damn neutral it could be a Turing Test exercise! If it isn’t then the intelligence behind “TGP” is just taking the piss out of us!
I voted Yes.
I just voted, and the “can an atheist be moral” poll read 100% yes!
Possibly someone just doesn’t know how to program a poll?
gypsytag @ 13: what is a soul?
I think it has something to do with African Americans
Probably a joke. The perp is probably LHAO watching Pharygula commenters going nuts.
Reading the comments section it appears that the webmaster has been paying for advertising to get people to come to the site. You basically just trashed something they paid (probably a lot) to create. Shame on you, PZ.
I will state that I do like it when you crash other polls.
We aren’t suprised. But why did you have to report it here, as we don’t care how you voted.
Looks to me like they may have reset the vote counts. I just voted, and most of the questions had less than 10 votes.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the webmaster keeps resetting the votes because s/he does not like the results.
Whoever registered the site did it through contactprivacy.com. So it’s just as likely to be a joke as it is to be real. Transparency doesn’t apply to either situation.
Note that there are way more total votes for the atheist question then any of the others (well life after death is close), only 2 vote tallied for the “soul” question?????
Is there life after death 400 votes
Does god exist 100 votes
resembles 2004 Ohio election returns
———————————————-
Jesus live on the radio
Hm. The raw data appears to be here:
http://www.thegodpoll.com/qN.txt, where N=1..5
just a few moments ago (presumably, in “Y,N,M” format):
q1: 3,134,13
q2: 1,148,18
q3: 0,5,16
q4: 99,0,0
q5: 78,0,1
Why doesn’t anyone ever add “Kinda” as an answer?
Or “Unask that”?
So lazy.
And just this past minute:
q1:1,27,7
q2:7,249,28
q3:10,103,26
q4:217,0,0
q5:62,0,1
I am starting to suspect some sort of bug in the data handling code, rather than deliberate mischief.
But I no longer feel interested in pursuing this.
Interesting little poll. It appears to have been reset now.
More interesting than the poll, to me at least, is that the owners went to the trouble of protecting the WHOIS data on the site. This is not a normal practice for those who regularly put up religiot polls (which this doesn’t appear to be). For one thing, anonymizing the WHOIS records would require some knowledge of how the Internet actually functions… which is well beyond most of the religiot groups.
The comments and the responses to them lead me to believe it’s somebody’s university research project. That is just a guess of course but it seems that way to me.
This site is smartened up. Clearing cookies won’t let me vote a second time, nor will negotiating a new IP via DHCP.
The poll is fine. It’s just that someone is praying, and with each prayer an angel comes and shifts a vote.
I just want to say I’ve officially become a bad atheist parent.
I used to be a good atheist parent — one who wanted their children to come to their own determination on religion and whether God exists, trying not to influence them directly.
After seeing more of how religious parents raise their children and the lengths to which they’ll go to indoctrinate other people’s children, I’ve given up. I’m not going to handicap my children against their techniques. Here on out, I don’t hold back — let those hypocrites accuse me of indoctrination, I really don’t care anymore.
Thanks. Sorry for the OT post, just needed to rant a bit.
It seems so. The ethics question is showing only 6 votes, while the others are in the hundreds. Is the polling site located in Alaska?
The results are so lopsided now, it’s hardly even fun – NOT. What a hoot.
huh? The results were only in the three digits now.
Off topic, but very interesting news.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122602394113507555.html
It says I just voted for McCain/Palin.
That’s still the case. Yes: 117 votes, no: 1 vote, maybe: 0 votes.
And the top question has yes: 5 votes, no: 236 votes, maybe: 35 votes.
Reminds me of Diebold voting machines. Except that those machines lost every tenth vote; this poll only keeps every tenth vote, or something.
Question 1,2 +3 don’t work… Didn’t like my answer…
Yeah, voted, went back 2 minutes later and 2 of the answers i voted for are back down to 0 votes…
Yeah, looks like mischief.
>> They’re making FUN of us!!! << But quite a nice riposte, if you think about it... ^_^J.
Anyhow, why would the above be asked when, “Can a religious person be ethical?” is not asked?
The whole thrust of the question is to make it sound iffy that an atheist could be ethical, while apparently saying that an invisible, evidence-free, but extremely powerful being of overriding importance (lying, IOW) automatically favors the idea that this intellectually dishonest person in fact is ethical.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Did y’all catch the comment by TGP saying that considering ID next to Evolution required that you be “open-minded”.
Hey! Was that a cat? Did it just come out of that bag?
Oops, #60 should have said,
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
See those crazy numbers jump around (2 minutes ago):
q1: 2,23,1
q2: 6,221,39
q3: 16,213,28
q4: 253,0,1
q5: 187,0,6
@ #61
I was just coming back to post that. Open minded… why does that one always bug me so much?
Anyway I do think that cat is unbagged.
What a silly idea! It’s like they think truth can be decided by majority vote! And even if it could, this wouldn’t indicate the majority. I wonder what the blogging bias is? What is more likely on the Internet, God or not God? I look forward to the results.
I’ll bet it’s some kind of prelude to a marketing scheme, or to statements about poll responders (or even poll crashers).
The lack of any info on who or why this is seems odd. Check the source, it contains a call to “urchintracker”, which I believe is part of Google Analytics. So I conclude that someone is gathering statistics on the kind of people who respond to such a poll – for what use we’ll see.
I see that the “can atheists be ethical” question that “no” has 0 votes while “maybe” has 000 votes. So “maybe” is way zeroer than “no”.
One minute ago:
q1: 2,61,11
q2: 0,106,122
q3: 16,301,36
q4: 143,0,000
q5: 134,0,10
Oh, and another thing (apropos “they’re making fun of us!!!”)—the domain is registered at contactprivacy.com.
Now who’d go to such lenghts and pay money to the man for a stupid poll? I wonder.
^_^J.
It’s a honey jar, I’d say, for atheists in general and poll crashers in particular. And the first blogs on the interwebs already started to quote from the poll’s comment section.
So is there something fishy about this? Well if you’d call “smelling rotten” fishy, then yes.
^_^J.
Seems to me that each question resets every 450-odd votes. This could be to prevent the results appearing skewed (with the actual votes saved separately), though perhaps it’s also encouraging poll-crashers to keep going, rather than to resign on a job well done.
Monks gone wild!!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081109/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_brawling_monks
Oh, and google analytics’s been set up for the poll, too. Check the source code.
Which doesn’t rhyme with the privacy section’s claims, to boot. If you check the google recommendations for privacy statements when using google analytics (scroll down to 8.1, 2nd paragraph), you will see that this grates quite a bit with thegodpoll’s “No IP addresses or other personal information is collected during the voting process.” Nice.
Yeah, and now I’m shutting up.
^_^J.
It’s tracking you using Flash local storage, not browser cookies. Right click and choose “Settings…” and on the “local storage” tab drag the slider down to zero if you want to experiment with voting again.
Bill O’Reilly has a poll asking if anyone wants to see Palin for in 2012.
http://www.billoreilly.com/
Voted!
From Joel’s posted link at #72:
Indeed.
Safety of visitors soon to be well in hand, thanks to divine insight into fire code violations.
Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous . . . .
No kings,
Robert
Hmm…four hours later and it’s been heavily pharyngulated. Hee hee. I gave it a little mouse-y push further in that direction.
I just checked back. Before, we really nailed it up, but it looks like it might have been anti-Pharyngulized, since it’s closer to 50-50, now.
Atheism: A World Of Lies
terrorists. that’s what you all are. think you’re something better. you’re not. just a bunch of pathetic dorks..
The masthead of this blog says, “PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.” Would the University of Minnesota like to know that one of their associate professors is using a science blog to urge hackers to take sites down? We’ll find out.
wtf? barely over 1/2 no on god … 99% maybe life after death, 96% maybe on evolution?? No god, but maybe souls, life after death and not evolution. my head is exploding.
Since he is in fact doing no such thing, I think the UoM will reject any such false accusation.
“Since he is in fact doing no such thing, I think the UoM will reject any such false accusation.”
The title of the blog post is “‘they’re just begging me to crash it,” clearly a call to the minions to crash it. And crash it they did.
There’s some serious tampering going on in this one… maybe they’re using those Diebold voting machines you americans fear so much!
When I voted the Evolution question had a huge majority for Yes and now it’s overwhelmingly Maybe. Either the webmaster is somehow messing with the totals or it simply doesn’t count the votes and gives us random totals for each option.
Liar.
Better than a liar like you.
Are too.
@85: Hey doofus, there’s a difference between poll-crashing and taking a site down. Go back to Microcomputer Skills 101.
At #77, Desert Son wrote:
Safety of visitors soon to be well in hand, thanks to divine insight into fire code violations.
Maybe they should just issue all visitors magic underwear.
@ apthorp: My head is spinning over the life after death, evolution, and soul questions as well.
Perhaps PZ needs to be a bit more clear that *all* supernatural superstitions are silly? … not just the religious ones ;-)
Tsk tsk. http://www.kobrascorner.com/opine/willful-ignorance.php
I guess dorfus is a new word. It probably means: ‘like a doofus, only far, far stupider’.
@92: A portmanteau of moron and doofus?
hi folks. i’ve enjoyed reading the forum. i would ask that you stop crashing the site, but if that’s really what you need to do, then i guess i understand.
to address some of the points above:
the site was a personal experiment, nothing more. i did pay for some ads on facebook, mainly for a short period to see if it was an effective way to drive traffic to the site. i did ask for privacy on the domain, and now you can see why. i understand some of the questions are ‘scientifically’ inaccurate, and may frustrate some users, but as i say many times on the site, it is not meant to be a scientific poll, just a personal curiosity experiment. if you read the comments you’ll see negative and positive comments from both sides of the fence (pro-creation, pro-evolution). i specifically added a ‘maybe’ comment because i was curious how many people, if forced to make a decision, might choose ‘maybe.’ as it turned out, many do, which i also find interesting.
anyway, if you really must destroy something to make your point, i have a hard time understanding that impulse, as i’m someone who likes to make things. but i did feel the forum deserved the courtesy of an answer to the comments above.
enjoy your evening.
A religious group (a more-kooky-than-usual group) is attempting to place their own religious guidelines in a public park in Utah. Their rationalization? There’s a huge ten commandments there.
Although I dislike all religions, it makes me happy that they’re infighting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/washington/11sect.html?hp
I don’t understand the use of the word “destroy”. Unless your server is so physically weak that it can’t cope with an increase in bandwidth, all we do is skew the numbers. Big deal.
Look, I’m sure that you are aware that the poll was in no way scientific. All you got were self-selected browsers who happened to find the site; that in no way takes into account actual demographics and population sampling.
All that happened was that for a brief while, you received answers from a highly unusual demographic, which is to say, Pharyngula readers. And given that Pharyngula has more than a few creationist/theist/agnostic readers and stalkers, I’m sure that the results would not have been uniform.
And as for “why”, well, primarily because it’s an amusing group effort. We know that in reality, we are generally a tiny minority of empirical skeptics in a vast sea of credulous believers. For a brief while, we can create the illusion — and we all know that it’s an illusion — that our skepticism is in the “majority”, even if it’s not real.
I notice that you didn’t address a particularly important point: Is your poll registration software defective, or were you (or someone) manually resetting or changing the poll values? It isn’t important for us, since we know that the poll is pointless, but I would assume that you would want for the votes actually being made to register properly. Unless the point of the poll was something far more subtle?
Wait a second, TGP. You created a website, advertised it and then complain when people use it? I’m confused.
Seeing how the numbers skipped around after a refresh, my first impression was (as the title of this post indicates) that it was deliberately set up to be Pharyngulated.
BTW, I disbelieve tgp @94.
I don’t understand how advertising and getting people to vote in a poll is “destroying” it.
I also don’t understand what is meant by the question; “Is evolution accurate?”
Is that asking if I believe if evolution occurs or not, or is it asking if I believe that the specific details of the theories of why evolution occurs are accurate? Or I guess it could be asking if the process of evolution has an accurate outcome on some measure, although I have no idea what would be being measured. I guess genetic drift could be seen as “inaccurate evolution” perhaps, on the assumption that evolution occurs to improve the “fitness” of an organism – pardon the anthropomorphism :P
The numbers are all over the board. This thing is a scam.
#74. Thanks for mentioning Flash local storage. I had never heard of it, and just looked it up only to find a cavalcade of website crap left behind on my computer. And here I had thought that I was privacy conscious. What a chump I’ve been.
@ #99
I didn’t understand the question “Is evolution accurate” either. What does that even mean in this context?
Going from the dictionary:
1. Free from error? Of course not. It can and will improve.
2. Conforming exactly to truth or to a standard? Truth… well you’d have to know what is true then. So lets go with a standard. Sure. It conforms perfectly to a standard. So yes, it is accurate.
3. Able to give an accurate result? Well, if an accurate result is one that would be expected according to a standard then absolutely!
So I have two + for accurate and one –
Does that equal a maybe?
Yeah… makes no sense. Perhaps they meant adequate? I think the question masks another one.
TGP: PZ has directed countless people to your website, free of charge. Although he uses the word “crash”, the people here are most likely voting their real stances. What’s to complain about?
I am starting to suspect some sort of bug in the data handling code, rather than deliberate mischief.
Impossible, it was designed by Diebold!
What the hell was the point of this poll? TPG said it was not meant to be scientific (good, cuz it’s even close). It was meant as a “personal curiosity experiment”. An experiment you do doesn’t go the way you want it so now you’re crying?
Not just that you’re manipulating the numbers? What the fuck is the point of this? You might as well just write the questions on a sheet of paper and make up numbers next to them. You don’t even have to make it add up to 100%. This “personal curiosity experiment” would be just as useful as “The God Poll”.
Note: The God Poll sounds like the name of a website for a well hung gay pornstar.
Gah.
So the only one who really “destroyed” his little poll page… was actually his own pathetic moronic self.
And then he comes crashing in here and blames us.
[Expletives deleted]
Craig @101, yeah! Thanks.
I’m starting to suspect that he’s Diebold’s special employee.
IF it was tpg, and IF It was meant as a “personal curiosity experiment”, no prob.
But, for all I know, it could be harvesting IPs or acquring stats on the degree of Pharyngulisation over time, or anything. Not that I’m worried.
dorfus:
That’s “crash” in the sense of “to crash a party”, not “to make non-operational”.
TGP, commenting at his/her own website:
Seems that PZ has taken care of that for you. Now, what was that you were saying?
PZ,
You should be ashamed of yourself!
I’ve take a quick poll of the comments (tpg style, of course) and come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of your commenters are disgusted and repulsed by your transparent efforts to take down other people’s web sites.
Shame, shame!!!
;-P
*taken*
Huh? People go to the site because it has paid advertising? Really.
Obviously, from context, that should read “without paid advertising, the site wouldn’t generate revenue”. So, either confused or dishonest.
John Morales #114:
I think they mean paid advertising for the site at other sites. That is, they were actually paying to advertise the site, not collecting ad revenue from visitors.
TGP @94:
I don’t see how you can possibly consider this ‘destroying’ your poll. You wanted people to vote on it, right? Heck, you even paid to get people there to vote for it at one time. The people going there from here to vote are voting their true beliefs. What’s the problem? You’re getting for free what you used to pay for.
Or is it that you only wanted people to vote on it as long as the numbers reflect your personal beliefs?
Why even make a poll if you’re going to fudge the numbers when you don’t get what you want? Why not just go ahead and write whatever numbers you want down and proclaim those to be your results? I don’t get it…
Joined the crash.
Brain @115, thanks for the clarification.
I retract my comment @114.
(And I hope it’s clear I had no quibble with your opinion @111).
John @ # 118,
no worries, no quibble interpreted. Just trying to make sense of what’s going on ;)
So lemme get this straight…This nut wants Seed to take down what is probably it’s most popular blog…Because we gave his site traffic, but found out that his ‘poll’ was a complete scam? Whatta maroon, indeed.
Poor baby he don’t want his poll crashed then he should not put it on the internet for any one any where to have access to it and then telling people about it. ahhhhh?
besides what do the questions mean, they are devoid of context?
none of the terms are defined
like what is meant by “life after death?”
there was “life ” when I first was aware that seemed to have been going on already so I would assume that it will be still going on when I am dead. What is meant by a soul? what is meant by god.
it is just an internet version of a “sunday supplement poll” and by his own words just an entertainment. so why complain?
or is there more going on here and the poll just bait?
bah!!
uncle frogy @121, that’s pretty harsh. I think the questions, especially taken together and in the context of a poll, were rather easy to interpret.
In passing, I note I just tried to go there and the page failed to appear.
Seems that the main html of the poll is now offline. The poll itself in all its useless glory is still there, though:
http://www.thegodpoll.com/questions.swf
Useless glory. what a perfect summary of internet meme copulation and the blogosphere lol. I love it!
Awww… the “Does God exist” question has been reset though: only 67 votes in total!
..which makes crashing it even easier though.
I was wondering why it was so out of whack with the other questions. The index HTML page is still blank. Looks like tgp is trying to retire his poll.
Off topic, but is anyone curious how the hardcore republican masses have been handling their loss? Maybe they’re willing to be big men about it and at least work for something constructive?
Not quite – http://obambi.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/obamaterrorists/
This guy seems to be following the Christian mantra:
“In case of a sudden outburst of reality, demand censorship!”
Pathetic.
You put a poll on-line and invited people to vote on it. People did.
So what did you learn?
hi, tgp here again.
okay, let me clear up a few points, i hope. i assumed ‘crashing’ meant you all were intentionally trying to bring my site down with the traffic. if i misunderstood, i apologize, and of course i appreciate the traffic.
second, the reason the numbers are all over the place is because the amount of traffic kept corrupting the data file, so i’ve had to keep restoring it to a “pre-pharyngula” data set (that set had the first question at 1416, 1624, and 677).
i can assure you there is no intentional data tampering going on. perhaps i have a low-rent web host, or perhaps the method of storing data via the flash files is prone to crashing, but that is all that is going on here.
i understand people take issue with the questions; i understand that. i’ve gotten complaints from both sides about the questions. for example, the ‘is evolution accurate’ question could be better worded. of course, i assumed as a poll, people would assume i was asking if in their opinion evolution was accurate. it never occured to me people would assume i meant for them to determine the accuracy of evolution. that would be some kind of poll?
in closing, i’ll answer other questions people may have, but i’d sincerely appreciate it if the insults would stop. i meant no harm in putting up the poll. as i’ve said, it was a personal experiment of curiosity. i collect no data on anyone, i don’t collect any ad revenue, and i’ve enjoyed reading comments from (nearly) everyone, most of which i eventually post on the god poll.
thank you.
And what did you learn?
http://obambi.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/obamaterrorists/
Wow… Some people really do not have a good grip on facts or reality, the stupid on that blog does not just burn, but is quite scary.
PZ – Grow up. Your behaviour is childish and contemptible. I also disagree with the poll, but what you are doing is an embarrassment.
#48:
Clear your session variables. (Firefox: press Ctrl+Shift+Delete) closing ALL instances of your browser should accomplish this as well. (session vars are vaporous)
@TGP:
Shame on you for using text-file output to store poll results — that’s part of your problem. Even a low-rent webhost should provide you with MySQL database access (or at LEAST something like MySQLite or PostGreSQL) — that will make the load easier for your server to handle, as DB transactions are MUCH more efficient than file I/O. Just be sure to parameterize your queries so you don’t receive any SQL injection attacks (now THAT would be “hacking” your site…)
Secondly — assuming that no one person voted more than once (and I don’t know if that’s the case, but you ARE taking measures to track that, right?), how has the votes from this blog skewed your results? One person – One Vote — that’s hardly unfair.
Just because one group happens to be over-represented isn’t a problem; It’s indicative of the lack of scientific sampling that are endemic to online polling. If every person that voted via this website had voted the same way after instead finding your website independently, would you revert those votes as well? Why does it matter that all the votes happened at once?
He’s childish and contemptible for pointing out an on-line poll?
You do realize the reason on-line polls exists if for people to vote on them. Right?
This tgp person is so incredibly disingenuous. This poll has been around quite a while, and I’ve voted in it before. In fact, it might even have been pharyngulated before, although I’m not going to spend time figuring out exactly where I found it before. However, I definitely got the link at an atheist hotspot like pharyngula, so the claims of corrupt data files and the like seem particularly lame. I think it’s more a social experiment than a personal curiosity experiment.
TGP@130 (if you are indeed the poll’s author):
This last response of yours seems rather disingenuous, considering you’ve already tried, by your own admission, to have PZ’s blog removed.
Secondly, while I was watching the poll yesterday, the votes were all repeatedly reset to zero, not to the numbers you cite. Even now, I’ve just seen the ethical atheist question flip from an overwhelming majority of “yes” votes, to 221 “maybe” votes and nothing else.
I (and most people here, I venture) would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that these continued anomalies are the result of poor programming, were it not for your rather bizarre behaviour in these comments and towards PZ.
@TGP: No. Crashing for us pharyngufolks pretty much just means “hey guys, go vote.”. I don’t think there is anyone that wants to break your thing.
Is it possible the Expelled people are in charge of this poll?
*snicker
Hrm. The “Maybe” result on “Can an atheist be ethical?” is showing the number of votes in octal…
PZ is encouraging people to misrepresent themselves as legitimate poll takers. That is a breach of the implicit poll contract and a disruption of its normal functioning. Poll options are not for you to click on them in whatever way you see fit. What PZ is doing is akin to stealing a pen from the post office. And then stabbing someone to death with it.
What the hell are you smoking?
#137, you are correct, I did ask to have the blogger, PZ Myers removed…because I thought “crashing” meant destroying. I did not realize it meant, “sending a group of voters to a poll en masse to sway the votes.” Now that I understand that, I retract my request. At least I’m intellectually honest enough to admit a mistake, and in a public forum no less.
To those of you wearing tinfoil hats who INSIST I have some nefarious reason for hosting the poll, or that I am intentionally skewing the numbers, you couldn’t be more incorrect. There will be no way for me to prove my point in this forum, since you’ll insist there must be some ‘evil’ behind my intentions, but the truth is, I really was excited by the initial results. Why? Because, while I know the questions are somewhat flawed, and I know I’m not a scientist, I am a person who is interested in the big ‘maybe.’ Okay, I’ll admit that much. I am a skeptic, but I am also open to saying, “hey, maybe my opinion could change, or maybe when forced to make a black and white decision, I might choose gray.” What I’ve found most interesting about my poll, and one of the main reasons I created it, was to see if we really were as divided as the media would have us believe, or if there weren’t a vast “maybe” out there.
So, I’m sorry some of you go through life with skepticism that is actually debilitating, and warps your view to make you assume everyone who disagrees is angry or corrupt. But for those of you who are just legitimate skeptics, interested in learning the truth, I thank you for taking the time to vote on my poll, and I hope it doesn’t continue crashing. I’m doing daily (or hourly, if I can) backups now to restore the data if it gets corrupted again.
PS The reason the poll gets set to zero is simple. I’m using simple plain text files to store the data. When they get corrupted, they go blank, empty, get deleted .Thus, the results go back to zero.
The technology behind the poll was purchased, and you can find more about how it works here: http://www.flashrelief.com/quickpoll/index.html
Whatever it is he’s smoking, it is filled with plenty of satire. I like it ^^
And the lesson learned from hosting an on-line poll is???????
On-line polls are inherently useless. They are un-scientific and prone to exactly the thing that happened here.
They mean virtually nothing.
@142: I would say he’s smoking weed but it doesn’t sound strong enough.
Polls are made to be voted on. People have the right to point others to them for voting. Andrés… You’re obviously a VERY confused person.
“PZ is encouraging people to misrepresent themselves as legitimate poll takers”
I had no idea that I didn’t qualify as legitimate to vote in the poll. A thousand apologies my good sir.
Bwaaa haa haa haaa!
Well said.
Steve M., I believe Andr
The question if evolution is “accurate” shows that the author doesn’t know much about science and the evolutionary theories. Accuracy implies that we know everything that can be known and that the present paradigms are final. And like any other scientist in the field, I know that there is no such thing as an all encompassing evolution theory and that all models change as we learn more. So if you only go by the formulation of the question, the answer should be “No”. However, I answered “Yes” since I suspect that the author meant to ask if the evolutionary processes exist at all, and to that question the answer is “yes”.
Oh! Satyre! Um, got it. :P
Whatever it is he’s smoking, it is filled with plenty of satire. I like it ^^
Yeah, funny how the second I click “Post”. my satire detector goes off. Now, where did I put the service contract for that thing…
Poes. Want one?
Your concern is noted.
I still don’t understand why he reset some results and not others.
Yes, many of us assumed the worst about TGP. We must remind ourselves to “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity… or incompetence.”
You purchased software that uses file I/O to store poll results and it gets corrupted every once in a while? I’d ask for my money back.
Awwwwwwwww!
**pinches tgps cheeks cause hes so friggen CUTE**
143: I’m not sure what you think it is we disagree on. I pointed out that your explanations appear unconvincing, then explained why.
As for debilitating scepticism, I’ll remind you that the following comment was yours:
“terrorists. that’s what you all are. think you’re something better. you’re not. just a bunch of pathetic dorks..”
With outbursts like that, we have every reason to be suspicious of your motives.
You mean, cute like a barking chihuahua?
My 2 cents :
maybe in the future, in order to avoid confusion, PZ should refrain from using the verb “to crash”, as that’s clearly not what the intention was.
“To Pharyngulate” seems like an obvious choice.
“To Pharyngulate a poll” is not equivallent to “To crash a poll”.
“To Pharyngulate a poll” simply means that the said poll will receive a sudden and relatively large influx of responses of Pharyngula readers, vast majority of them being non believers, skeptics and other freethinkers, with the obvious consequences this entails for the results of the said poll.
“To crash a poll” seems far too pejorative and can lead to the confusion that the intentions of PZ and the Pharyngula readers were to render said poll non-operational.
And to tgp and all would be poll masters, when we Pharyngulate a poll, we are simply exercising our right to freedom of speech. Do you have any problem with that ?
And if you think Pharyngula readers do not constitute a sufficiently representative sample of the population, you might want to have asked yourself first if any sample you might have collected online would have been representative.
tgp #143
The problem is that online polls prove nothing. The people voting don’t accurately reflect the general population. That’s the reason we crash polls, just to show how meaningless the results are. Don’t take is personally, we do it to alot of people.
A much better way to gauge the divide would have been to start up a forum or blog and invite comments. The dialogue would have much more revealing than an online poll. Or go to some of the MANY blogs/forums that deal with religion/evolution and read the comments.
You could also research scientific polls (i.e, polls whose sample accurate represent the general population). Many of these polls have asked questions similar to what you were asking. If however you wish to do it yourself you could make alot of calls, go to a mall, etc. and poll people. Granted this would be alot of work and would require some background in statistics in order to avoid making errors.
You purchased software that uses file I/O to store poll results and it gets corrupted every once in a while? I’d ask for my money back.
Geez, it’s actually easier to use a database backend, and more than one user at a time could update the data. There are plenty of really good open source freeware dbs out there, and quite a few ISPs will host a MySQL/PHP solution for a very small fee. There’s no excuse for software design that is that crappy when there are so many low cost and high quality options available.
negentropyeater:
You’re parsing language. “Crashing a party” is a common colloquialism and “crashing a poll” is a logical extension of that idiomatic phrase. It does not imply destruction, -only that one does not have a formal invitation but plans on attending anyway and perhaps will bring other uninvited guests .
Yeah he’s just trashing votes he doesn’t like.
There were tons of ethical atheist votes yesterday and he switched them to maybes.
What an ass.
Even that implies that poll crashers are there uninvited. It’s more like they put fliers up on every telephone poll in the world advertising their party and then complained about who showed up.
“Poll crashing” is no different than encouraging people to vote on election day.
So PZ is the new cmdrtaco?
Not sure what right he has to complain that you sent all of your readers there.
The poll maker surely wants a representative sample of all people on the internet. Surely, he did not just make a poll to find out what people who already agree with him think. What would the point of that be?
Similarly, he is smart enough to prevent people from voting multiple times from the same IP, yes?
I think this whole thing was a set up from the beginning to retaliate for the “Pharygulization” of online polls. Really has nothing to do with his own beliefs and whether or not he likes the answers. He is just trying to mess with us in some perverse version of “how do you like your own medicine?”.
#162:
Failing to use locking when updating a text file in an environment which can have concurrent writes (such as in this case) is such a neophyte programming error that I’m guessing that whoever wrote this POS wouldn’t even know how to use a database. If the explanation offered is true, that is.
My favorite part is when he claimed he wanted to see people’s veiws
but then when a large portion of people with the same view (that aren’t his) he says it’s inaccurate.
silly. =3
E.V.
I see, well if it’s already a well understood idiomatic phrase, there shouldn’t be any confusion then.
However, a quick google search of the term “crash a poll” reveals that it’s still very much limited to our skeptics community.
But we’re trendsetters, aren’t we, so you’re probably right.
Please dump my comment under “french ignorance” of American neocolloquialism ;-)
It’s so easy for us stateside to commit the sin of Americentrism, so I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for assuming that everyone world wide would know idiomatic terms like gate crashing, party crashing, poll crashing. With so many well spoken posters here at Pharyngula, I forget that many are multilingual/multicultural and that we Americans tend to be solipsistic from the standpoint of culture.
“You purchased software that uses file I/O to store poll results and it gets corrupted every once in a while? I’d ask for my money back.”
I might. I have a hard time with the commentor who said implementing a rudimentary CMS would be less expensive than a $25 software solution. Clearly you’re not very familar with the costs associated with developing and implementing a CMS.
To the other tinfoil hat wearers who insist I must be skewing the numbers because they keep going back to zero, I’ve offered my response: the text files keep getting corrupted. Does that make me a bad or stupid person? I guess in your judgmental world it does. But the irony of people who are so judgmental and closed-minded and then claim they are not is reminiscent of another group of fanatics.
I appreciate the lesson you’ve all given me: as an atheist, even people who think like me can be unmitigated douchebags.
And before you flame me, even as I posted the retort above, I regretted it. Your anger and hostility got the better of me. Have a nice day.
You made it this far in life and just now are learning that?
tgp/Dorfus is unstable at best:
You’re mean…assholes!…terrorists!..fire you…take down your blog….I regretted that even before I sent it…but you made me….why do you keep making me hit you?! I love you; have a nice day….
I have a hard time with the commentor who said implementing a rudimentary CMS would be less expensive than a $25 software solution. Clearly you’re not very familar with the costs associated with developing and implementing a CMS.
Honestly? Writing a poll page in PHP would take me less than an hour, and my ISP hosts a MySQL database and PHP pages for free as part of their basic plan. And I rarely do PHP, since most of my work is in the Microsoft .NET world, but it’s extremely to work with.
Really, it’s just two tables, and probably 3 queries total. A php poll page and a php results page, both with about a dozen lines of code, max. If you wanted to be fancy, you could have the whole thing be xml driven and add an authoring tool, but that would be another couple of hours work.
WHAAAAAAA! They crashed my poll that asks questions they’re interested in! WHAAAAAAAA!
Douche, up till then you had a point. THEN you say “don’t FLAME ME , bro! It’s that chicken shit punch and run mentality. When you find yourself in a hole…. learn to STFU.
Of course, I make more than $25 an hour, so my custom solution would probably cost more than the $25 purchased solution, but software that works is worth more than software that doesn’t.
Just so folks know, there’s a firefox extension called Objection that lets you see and delete all .sol files easily at once. These files are basically flash cookies that sit on your computer indefinitely. This guys “poll” uses them.
Ummm, no, not exactly. It’s uniting a group (in our case, a HUGE group with a focused bias for empiricism) to enter a site en masse to reflect a rather distinct POV. The semantic difference is that we intentionally skew the results and overwhelm the polls by any and all possible means including voting many times per person by changing servers, IP addresses and/or dumping cookies. It is important to mention that these online polls are ultimately pointless and useless unlike elections.
(I can’t believe I wrote that last line with a straight face).
Elections do matter. Despite what boneheads like Scott from Oregon says.
I can’t believe you wrote “bias for empiricism”,
at least without pointing out that empirical reality is how we know that all other biases are biases away from said reality.
You mean like the election?
Fair enough, although I consider the fact that they can be gamed so easily part of the reason why they are pointless.
You know, I think some of you guys are being rather harsh on TGP at this point. Granted, the initial “I hope Seed takes down your blog” was kind of over the top, but given that we now know that it was based on a misunderstanding, maybe time to let it go?
Oh, and, whilst I understand that some people care deeply about this stuff, horse whipping the site owner for poor implementation of poll software seems a little unnecessary… I don’t see any reason to assume anything nefarious happening with the results.
There’s nothing wrong with that for a one-off hack this size, but shame on the guys who sold the “technology” to him for selling crap. $10 says they’re not locking the data file.
Strictly speaking, that doesn’t make much sense (any more than “train journeys are more efficient than wheels”), but I know what you mean and I think it’s very highly likely to be false in the case of a very small and simple dataset such as this.
Being an inveterate nitpicker, I conducted a quick empirical test. On a “one request per run” basis (traditional CGI-style), a very crude and naïve file I/O based solution opens the file (of 15 kvps), parses it, increments 5 values, and writes the lot back to disk ~15 times faster than it takes just to establish a connection to a test database on a MySQL server on the same machine and exit without doing anything. On a “many requests per run” basis (Apache module style), giving MySQL the benefit of all possible doubts (allowing it to maintain the database connection open with prepared statement handles, etc.), and utterly crippling the file I/O solution (making it reopen and reread the file every single time), the file I/O solution is still twice as fast (over 10,000 requests).
Personally, for something like this I’d use whatever convenient suitable persistence the server-side language I’m using provides (probably Berkeley DB) and wouldn’t fret about the underlying storage: for a trivial short-lived program like this, there’s no point investing expensive programmer time to save a few cheap CPU cycles.
There is loads, and loads, and loads, of free software out there to run polls. And they do it well, without corrupting anything.
If you paid anything at all, you got ripped off. And you’re an idiot.
Emmet: The problem with flat-file IO isn’t speed. The problem is effective concurrency. With flat files, you have to manually lock and unlock the file, and hope you got the locking right. Database engines (including, to my knowledge, SQLite and MySQL) handle concurrency for you.
Yeah, tpg got his ass handed to him after he flung insults as a sockpuppet and then
apologizedblamed everyone for his bad behavior. Where do you get horsewhipping over software? It’s easy to give him a bit of a razzing when we learned the wildly fluctuating numbers were caused by incompetence and software – not malice.What I see is several people trying to help him with IT; some very practical advice from some very knowledgeable geeks. ;p
Which is why if you want real data, you use the protocol for a scientific poll.
What is this poll even trying to accomplish? Yeah, polls are stupid, especially ones like this, but at least they add a little data here and a little data there. But this one…if you’re going to manipulate it like this, it’s not even pretending to gather data. Why have the poll at all? Someone should tell this moron that’s he’s an idiot.
Please, PZ, don’t insult an innocent color by linking it with such idiots.
E.V.@#172, it’s okay you don’t have to go all cultural cringey on us.
I’m older than PZ (but not as old as Johnny Rotten) and I’m more English than the Queen, and the first thing I got from PZ’s headline was “better get a few cans from the offie, and head over there”.
The tgp thing is so whiffily disingenuous and passive-aggressive about its victim status I can only assume it’s some sort of religious cretin trying to fight blogosphere fire with … er … stuff.
You can indeed ignore that particular problem. But changing the wording to “is the theory of evolution accurate” would make a lot more sense.
Calm down, it was just a misunderstanding over the meaning of “crash”.
That said, one thing I have learned in my extensive experience in poll-crashing is the existence of http://www.polldaddy.com, which lets you create polls for free, doesn’t crash (…see how that word has too many meanings?), and lets you make comments. It’s easy to vote several times there, but that’s the case in almost all Internet polls, and they’re pointless anyway.
#194, he’s fighting hard scientific fire with South Park fence-sitting, smug agnostic “can’t we find a middle ground?”
Yer but no but … I remember (gate)crashing parties when computer programming was done by poking holes in sheets of roach material, a bit like Floridian voting machines, so I reckon semantic priority to the ‘uninvited guest’ sense.
So what if you young hipsters have kidnapped it and perverted its true meaning.
And tgp’s still a complete arse for pretending to misunderstand.
Thus spake Benjamin Geiger:
No shit :o)
That’d be the reason why I said “$10 says they’re not locking the data file” and why I identified a concurrent database library, Berkeley DB, as suitable.
I have two confessions.
First, I’m a pedantic git with a pathological dislike of “efficiency” being presented as a reason for doing something a particular way without justification. I would ban programmers from using that word without defining what they mean and using evidence to back up claims like “much more efficient”.
Second, I probably misinterpreted the “shame on you” that the original poster used as snarky and condescending when it was probably meant humourously. Then when I saw a (pretty obviously) false statement, I took the opportunity of correcting it.
Now, I guesstimated based on a reasonable guess of the number of disk block reads/writes, that “DB transactions are MUCH more efficient than file I/O” would be false for a dataset of this size and simplicity, then conducted an experiment to show the same empirically, to make sure I was on solid ground before opening my piehole.
Hope? Really, for something this simple it’s a standard pattern you can use straight from the can. Any programmer who can’t do it, or lacks the Google-Fu to find out about it in two minutes flat, should be pelted to death with balls of his/her own excrement. The same fate should be suffered by everyone who ever taught them programming for not beating the importance of handling concurrency correctly into them.
I’ve absolutely no problem with using MySQL for this kind of thing, none whatsoever. I did it myself a bazillion times over 10+ years doing web backends, but if you’re snarkily telling someone off — as I (mis-)interpreted it originally — and explaining why to do things a particular way, the reasons you give should correctly apply to the situation at hand, as, for example, does your own identification of concurrency.
When I taught programming, if you asked a student “why did you write that bit in assembly?”, they’d blurt out “for efficiency”, when the truth was “because I wanted to learn how” or “because it was more fun” (both perfectly good reasons!). In industry, “uh… for efficiency” as an answer to “why that way?” is almost a shibboleth for incompetence and code for “I don’t remember”, “it seemed like a good idea at the time”, or “I haven’t a fucking clue” and it’s accepted uncritically far too often.
End of rant :o)
There. Fixed.
j/k
Also notice how the title of this post is “It’s like they’re just begging me to crash it”. For everyone who regularly reads Pharyngula, the meaning was clear, but he never said “poll crashing”. “It” could have referred to the site itself. I can easily see how tgp thought it meant to DDOS the site, especially after his site went down. The comparison to crashing a party isn’t obvious.
I still don’t understand the evolution question. Yeah I understand that TGP just wanted my opinion, but that doesn’t change how I feel about the question. I guess the question is not “is evolution accurate?” but “do you believe life evolves?”
qbsmd:
Let’s recap:
A misunderstanding of the term “crash”, wildly fluctuating poll results, two opposing sides where each accuses the other of shenanigans, ridiculous sock puppetry, dodgy explanation of fluctuations, advice from ITK geeks, followed by a shit-flinging non-apology. Happy?
It was part snark — I posted it early in the morning and hadn’t had my coffee yet. :) “Efficiency” was the incorrect term to use, as another commenter (or was that you?) graciously corrected me.
What I meant was: “If you are repeatedly having problems with text file corruption, then you should try using a simple DB solution using software that is freely available.” I write silly little polls like those for my employer frequently, and Mark B is correct — an hour, two tops, 3 queries, PHP, some duct tape, 3 circus clowns, and a bag of Cheetos is all it would take. (I also agree with whomever said that it was idiotic to pay $25 for a janky solution like that — not because the solution was janky, but because there are dozens of FREELY AVAILABLE poll apps out there written by hobbyist hackers.
Again — I stand corrected on the verbiage — again, I’m hiding under the “I can’t brain until I’ve been awake for longer than an hour” excuse. :)
Aaron @203,
As I said, I’m just a pedant with a corncob up his ass about the word “efficiency”. I’ve written more than my fair share of web stuff too and, as you say, this is a one-banana job. I’d even say they’re so trivial that it’s probably easier to write from scratch than find online, evaluate, and integrate into whatever you’re doing, especially if you’re going to come across mountains of the kind of crap that this poll was running on.
And, in fairness, if you were being snarky, you were being snarky to someone who had been a bit of a jerk.
Okay, I’m late to this game.
He thought his poll was under attack, so he lashed out.
Kinda rash I guess.
He realised his error, sacked up, and came back to say he was sorry. cool
He was judgemental and a little smarmy. Like roughly 3/4 of us.
He isn’t as tech savy as some here. Yeah, I barely know how to use a mouse.
He seems curious and bright. I like him.
Let’s invite him to stop by again.
ggab,
You want someone who uses sockpuppetry here? As for being “bright”, well… I suppose you’re entitled to your opinion, despite it being entirely against the evidence so far available.
John
He seemed reasonably intelligent.
I just think he may have been reacting to what he saw as an attack. I’ve certainly done some silly things like that.
We do get a little harsh from time to time.
Once in a while, I worry that we may chase away like minds.
Maybe I’m just having an overly sensitive moment.
Perhaps I should sack up myself.
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG??
ggab, I too wish to encourage contributors here, and perhaps I’m being premature in my own opinion. Time will tell.
Your concern is noted.;)
Ahhh… much ado about nothing. The guy creates a crappy poll using crappy software; gets annoyed when we say we are “crashing” it – and posts some nasty remarks because of it, and then his software crashes; and now regrets being nasty. I think its time to back off. There really isn’t anything to see here.
TGP, I would suggest using one of the free survey/poll creation sites that run the stuff on their servers.
Now lets chill out and move on to something more entertaining. TGP, I hope you post your findings whenever you can figure them out.
The site now says that the poll is down for repairs.
Why the heck didn’t tgp just use SurveyMonkey.com or some similar site? Free, and a lot more reliable than homebrew or (apparently) Diebold.