A BIG issue with Straw Polls is VPN abuse. Even me, I have a friend who does this with the sole intention of ruining a poll. They will vote, use a VPN to change their IP, then vote again. In an 8 person community, there could be 50 votes for a single silly poll answer. Maybe a way to solve this would be to allow multiple "Duplication Checking" options? So it checks for IP AND Browser cookies, or maybe add some further "Duplication Checking" options, if even possible.
2 comments
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Jesse Forgione The main problem with this is that cookie duplication is even easier to bypass. Simply answering the poll in incognito mode and refreshing the page is enough to trick it, so VPN + Incognito mode would still beat both duplication checking methods.
The only real way to make sure each person only votes once is to force everyone to use an account, but even still it's easy to foil by getting multiple emails.
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Lomanwilliams Uhh, I'm not sure how to directly reply to you, but two words.
Mobile authentication.
You could have your strawpolls be set to only those with mobile authentication. Perhaps it's not a big enough site to do this, but it is a way to get around it.
And at this rate, to do a strawpoll that requires a mobile authentication multiple times, you'd need to have multiple phones. And at that rate, is the hassle really that worth it?