Sunday, December 30, 2007
Cheaters corrupt the year's best shots
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Making sense of local elections
- Voters have only themselves to blame
- Money flows freely to local candidates
- Candidates contemplate a little big-box store
From the RoundTable blog
Someone always has to spoil the fun.
On most days, The Current prints reader-submitted photographs on page 2, hundreds of them in a year. "Your Best Shot" showcases the moments that make the New River Valley special.
Ubiquitous digital cameras allow anyone to snap the shutter when the moment is right. Those photographers must drive around with their cameras on their laps. Perhaps they even practice whipping them out at home so there is no delay.
When I have a camera with me, it's invariably in the bottom of the bag or deep in a coat pocket. By the time I dig it out and power it up, the dancing opossum has moonwalked behind a bush.
For some end of the year fun, the paper selected 30 of the year's best photos and asked readers to choose the best of the Best Shots in an online poll.
The winners appear in today's edition. They reveal some interesting, if trivial, tidbits about the voters. Animals are in, people not so much. Two dogs, two butterflies, a squirrel, a deer and a groundhog were among the favorites.
Plenty of the 30 finalists depicted people -- kids at play, kids being nauseatingly cute, some guy in pajamas up to his waist in a river trying to coax kids in pajamas to join him. Yet the only human among voters' favorites had her face obscured by one of those winning butterflies.
Everyone likes landscapes, too. An icy Ellett Valley on Valentine's Day took the top spot in the voting. Sunset at a Pulaski County football game also fared well.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who helped brighten the New River Valley's mornings this year with their pictures.
Your thoughts
- Post to the message board
- Agree or disagree? Take the poll
I could end the column here. Winners declared; kudos thrown; appreciation expressed.
I could, but the sinister truth won't allow it. This year's best Best Shots are a sham.
Nothing against the winner. It's a nifty shot. All of the finalists were. Unfortunately, spoilers stuffed the virtual ballot box and ensured winning meant little.
The software that powers the paper's online polls isn't particularly sophisticated. It uses cookies, little snippets of information placed on a computer, to track who has voted already.
It doesn't take a whole lot of computer know-how to bypass that security and vote multiple times. Clever users have even figured out how to get a computer to cast hundreds or thousands of votes.
A few weeks ago, when the best Best Shots poll went up, things started fine. Votes trickled in, about a thousand over a few weeks. Then, at the end of the final week, the numbers spiked. Thousands of votes flooded in for just a few of the photos. When our computer people discovered someone was cheating, they pulled the poll, but it was too late.
Is winning this year's contest, which has no prize beyond pride, really that important to someone? Maybe it was a Winter Solstice present from a budding hacker in the family.
Whatever the reason, someone revealed the depths of his foolishness, not the heights of his cleverness. These online polls aren't scientific to begin with. That's why there's a disclaimer at the bottom of the results page.
Polls are popular online diversions because they are fun, not because they reveal deep insights. They don't -- or at least shouldn't -- sway public officials or even the public at large. All cheaters do is waste their time and ruin the fun for everyone else.
Alas, such skullduggery is common on the Internet. This isn't even the first corrupted Roanoke Times poll. The Virginia Tech Four-Minute Film Festival met a similar fate in the fall. The cheating got so bad that the poll system broke.
Some of the "Agree or disagree" polls that run with my columns have met a similar fate. Groups passionate about an issue flood the system thinking turning out en masse will somehow make their causes more just. They fool only themselves.
These days, polls are on the outs at roanoke.com. The one with my column remains the last bastion of regularly scheduled multiple-choice fun.
But maybe it shouldn't. This most recent bout of polluted polling has me wondering if it, too, should retire. What do you think? Cast your vote online.
Christian Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley Bureau in Christiansburg.
