Monday
Aug022010
Your Questions About Vote Auditing
Monday, August 2, 2010 at 10:00AM
Several of you have emailed us questions about our vote audit. Why do we do it? What does it entail? Is it necessary? Let's take a look behind the scenes and see what goes on in that period of downtime between the end of nominations and the announcing of our finalists.
The reason we have a vote audit is because people cheat and try to game our voting system. During the nomination phase, ballots are restricted by IP address to combat that, but even that can be circumvented. If we had the money and resources to build an advanced voting system that prevented that, we would -- but we don't. (Yet another reason to support what we do.)
People also game the system and skew the nominations by submitting ballots with one URL for each category, whether it's applicable or not. Those ballots are thrown out. We know people have their favorite blogs, and we know people may not even be aware of different blogs to nominate for some of our categories, but when you put in the URL for a site in a category you know it doesn't fit in, who is that helping? Not you, not us, and certainly not the blog you nominated.
We export all the ballots to a spreadsheet, do a fair bit of advanced Excel wizadry, and most of all visit every URL nominated in every category. It takes a long time, but rest assured, every ballot is looked at with human eyes at the end of the nomination period.
Good question. Per our privacy policy, we do not use any of this information to track you personally. We ask for names and email addresses for two reasons:
And that's it! We're not selling your information to the highest bidder (or any bidder, for that matter), and we don't use your information to spam you. When you provide fake email addresses or no email addresses at all, we can't contact you if we have questions. It's as simple as that.
Finalists are released to everyone at the same time -- August 1. We never reveal blogs before that point, nor do we tell people how many nominations a particular blog received. Not even if you're the blog owner.
Oh, one reason we love the vote audit is because the chairman is a huge math dork and loves to crunch numbers. The statistics gathered help us with category selection for next year (see: What is the Category Popularity Matrix?), overall patterns of voting for planned downtime and upgrades, and ways to forecast next year's growth and popularity.
Here's a few things we learned this year.
Most Nominated Category: Blog to Watch (8.99%)
Least Nominated Category: Best Science or Technology Blog (0.60%)
Biggest Jump in Popularity: Best Sex or Relationships Blog (+17 slots)
Biggest Drop in Popularity: Best Science or Technology Blog (-30 slots)
Most Popular Nomination Day: Tuesday
Least Popular Nomination Day: Sunday
Most Popular Nomination Date: June 2, 2010
Least Popular Nomination Date: July 4, 2010
Most Nominated Blogging Platform: Blogspot (36.6%)
Least Nominated Blogging Platform: Tumblr (2.89%)
Average daily number of submitted ballots: 175
Average daily number of valid ballots: 84
Average ballot completion percentage rate: 46.12%
Percentage of completed ballots out of all submitted ballots: 46.8%
Those last stats were interesting, as this is the first year we've had a multi-page nomination form, mainly because we got so much negative feedback about our old nomination form (which was basically one long page with all the categories). Breaking it up into separate pages let us see what pages were most and least visited.
Out of all the ballots we received, over half were not even completed (53.2%). Out of the uncompleted ballots, most people didn't get past page one (79.5%). That tells us that people visited the ballot, but never actually cast a nomination -- all those got thrown out in our vote audit because they weren't actually fully completed. That's valuable information that we can use for next year.
So as you can see, our vote audit not only produces the finalists, but also helps us run a tighter ship by observing voting patterns and adapting accordingly.
If you made it all the way to the end here, congratulations! Get yourself a cookie. You've earned it.
Why do you have a 'vote audit'? I thought this was about the public's vote. -- Miss G
The reason we have a vote audit is because people cheat and try to game our voting system. During the nomination phase, ballots are restricted by IP address to combat that, but even that can be circumvented. If we had the money and resources to build an advanced voting system that prevented that, we would -- but we don't. (Yet another reason to support what we do.)People also game the system and skew the nominations by submitting ballots with one URL for each category, whether it's applicable or not. Those ballots are thrown out. We know people have their favorite blogs, and we know people may not even be aware of different blogs to nominate for some of our categories, but when you put in the URL for a site in a category you know it doesn't fit in, who is that helping? Not you, not us, and certainly not the blog you nominated.
We export all the ballots to a spreadsheet, do a fair bit of advanced Excel wizadry, and most of all visit every URL nominated in every category. It takes a long time, but rest assured, every ballot is looked at with human eyes at the end of the nomination period.
I wanted to nominate my favorite blogs, but I don't like the fact that my name and email address are REQUIRED for submission. What are you doing with all these email addresses, might I ask?? -- Jerome
Good question. Per our privacy policy, we do not use any of this information to track you personally. We ask for names and email addresses for two reasons:
- If there is an error with your fully completed ballot, we need to be able to contact you for clarification.
- If you would like to opt into receiving our newsletter (which is a double opt-in procedure), we need your email address to do so. We ask for your name also, but it's not required.
And that's it! We're not selling your information to the highest bidder (or any bidder, for that matter), and we don't use your information to spam you. When you provide fake email addresses or no email addresses at all, we can't contact you if we have questions. It's as simple as that.
Can you tell me if [insert blog name here] is a finalist? How many nominations did they get? - Mikaela G.
Finalists are released to everyone at the same time -- August 1. We never reveal blogs before that point, nor do we tell people how many nominations a particular blog received. Not even if you're the blog owner.
Aside from choosing the finalists, what other information do you get from the vote audit? -- Sarah L.
Oh, one reason we love the vote audit is because the chairman is a huge math dork and loves to crunch numbers. The statistics gathered help us with category selection for next year (see: What is the Category Popularity Matrix?), overall patterns of voting for planned downtime and upgrades, and ways to forecast next year's growth and popularity.
Here's a few things we learned this year.
Most Nominated Category: Blog to Watch (8.99%)
Least Nominated Category: Best Science or Technology Blog (0.60%)
Biggest Jump in Popularity: Best Sex or Relationships Blog (+17 slots)
Biggest Drop in Popularity: Best Science or Technology Blog (-30 slots)
Most Popular Nomination Day: Tuesday
Least Popular Nomination Day: Sunday
Most Popular Nomination Date: June 2, 2010
Least Popular Nomination Date: July 4, 2010
Most Nominated Blogging Platform: Blogspot (36.6%)
Least Nominated Blogging Platform: Tumblr (2.89%)
Average daily number of submitted ballots: 175
Average daily number of valid ballots: 84
Average ballot completion percentage rate: 46.12%
Percentage of completed ballots out of all submitted ballots: 46.8%
Those last stats were interesting, as this is the first year we've had a multi-page nomination form, mainly because we got so much negative feedback about our old nomination form (which was basically one long page with all the categories). Breaking it up into separate pages let us see what pages were most and least visited.
Out of all the ballots we received, over half were not even completed (53.2%). Out of the uncompleted ballots, most people didn't get past page one (79.5%). That tells us that people visited the ballot, but never actually cast a nomination -- all those got thrown out in our vote audit because they weren't actually fully completed. That's valuable information that we can use for next year.
So as you can see, our vote audit not only produces the finalists, but also helps us run a tighter ship by observing voting patterns and adapting accordingly.
If you made it all the way to the end here, congratulations! Get yourself a cookie. You've earned it.
Reader Comments (1)
Have questions about our vote auditing process? http://bit.ly/9RDDE8" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/9RDDE8
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