More Goblet of Fire

[jack]

I even did leave the review written for a couple of days in case I thought of something else, but only now did it occur to me.

* Tennant was great. I don't know if he can do a good guy, but I'll give Doctor Who a shot.
* I loved the Sirius-in-the-fire effect, though it was different to how I imagined it.
* I loved McGonnagal dancing.

And a couple of responses[1].

* Several people said they liked how Voldemort looked, but I still didn't.

He was cool and creepy.
WTF? Why am I scared of a badly made auton?
Comments:

* Did anyone else not read the book? I don't think anything in the film had necessary priors left out, but I would have thought there would be dangling things. Note, eviscerated isn't a critisicm necessarily, I know it was necessary. But things like Rita Skeeta might have been odd when she's just there, but never in the plot.

[1] LJ is not the medium for this.

Comments

[simont]

I'm curious. I assumed the broken image after your last home-made poll was some sort of one-off coding error, but this one has it too. What's it for? (And is there really no way it couldn't at least be turned into a non-broken image?)

[yrieithydd.livejournal.com]

The particularly weird thing is that it appears on my friends' page, but when I clicked to read the comment the broken image goes away!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Apparently so. I hadn't thought to test that before. Doh.

And in other news, it's *still* eerie when private posts appear on friends' friends' pages :)

[yrieithydd.livejournal.com]

And in other news, it's *still* eerie when private posts appear on friends' friends' pages :)

I'm glad it's not just me who finds that odd!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Apologies. 'tis a hacked way to capture lj names; it should return a picture, but that code was buggered, and I never saw the broken image, so hadn't got round to fixing it.

[simont]

In other words, its purpose is to record the referer URL every time the image is fetched? Does that work well? I suppose anyone who reads your entry via their friends page would leave a useful referer in your logs, but people who read your journal directly would surely not provide any helpful information? And as for the few people I know who read someone else's friends page because it's easier than setting up one of their own ...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes. IME it works most of the time.

What would you do?

Yes, I could just get a paid account, but we've reached the point where I'm being stubborn now :)

[simont]

I think that I'd probably stop trying. Having satisfied myself that it wasn't possible to get a genuinely accurate list of people who had responded to the poll, I'd do things for which it didn't matter anyway rather than attempting an 85% solution. If I needed to know specific people's responses then I'd ask them to leave comments (possibly screened depending on subject matter); if I was interested in general poll-type stuff then I'd probably just not bother with user tracking and only collect the aggregate results.

I'm not sure how I'd deal with the possibility of multiple-vote fraud. I suspect the simple answer is that it can't be done without a genuine ability to authenticate someone as an LJ user, and even then it's iffy because people can have multiple accounts. So on the basis that anyone who seriously wants to rig the vote can do so, the appropriate actions are (a) not to run any poll which might give someone a serious incentive to rig it, and (b) even then, to take the results with a pinch of salt.

LJ's concept of a non-secret ballot in which everyone can see how you voted and you can peek at everyone else's answers before giving your own has never struck me as a particularly good means of getting real data (although I grant you that it can be entertaining), so I don't think I'd miss it if my own techniques didn't permit me to implement it.

But more likely, I simply wouldn't bother anyway: I've had a permanent account since 2003 (the LJ admins use PuTTY and were grateful) and I've never yet had the urge to post a poll. When I do solicit opinions from my readership I tend to be interested in more complex responses than a simple yes/no/tickybox.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I don't know. 85% seems to satisfy my curiosity. Though doing something more productive has something to be said for it :)

No, I don't expect very meaningful results (though I think most of the time no-one tries to cheat).

When I do solicit opinions from my readership I tend to be interested in more complex responses than a simple yes/no/tickybox.

Indeed. Though I find there is meaningful minority of the time people would respond to a comment box in a poll but not post a reply, and seems that there's a lot of people constantly lurking who barely ever reply, so I'm curiosly experimenting with minor social engineering :)

[mair_in_grenderich]

but surely you don't need the "image" though? you should get the referer information when they actally click on the poll anyway?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

But people often go and read the comments before answering, or perhaps open it in a new tab.

[mair_in_grenderich]

people would respond to a comment box in a poll but not post a reply

One of the reasons I nearly always fill in polls on my friends page doesn't apply to yours: I want my friends page to be displaying the results rather than the questions.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah. Hmmm.

*needs to socially engineer flurble*

[mair_in_grenderich]

don't I fill in your polls anyway? :)