Polls

[Rob Monster]

Just wanted to support you in this post @Ategy.com. I voted a number if days ago in the poll, but to me it seemed immediately obvious that the voting was rigged for VettedName. It had 30% of the votes but no mentions (at the time) in the thread as to why anyone was picking it. I also saw it as a relatively poor name and for the vote to be at such an overwhelming majority was highly irregular. I was going to mention at the time that someone should check how many new NP accounts were voting for it, but thought better of it and deleted the comments before I posted them. So I just stopped watching the thread and decided to ignore it since I was pretty sure others would figure it out too. So I've read nothing between page 2 and page 9. I just decided to jump in again as the thread was in the 'popular this week' box. I read this last page and from your post I can pretty well guess what the pages of posts have been about so I'm quite happy I've been ignoring the thread till now. Anyway, your post seems very diplomatic and well thought out so just wanted to say so. I shall now go and hide back under my rock...

I do think @Paul Buonopane will want to look at the problem of "Ballot stuffing" and "Brigading". The technique that I think is interesting is to use a service like Maxmind that measures the integrity of a user. In the case of Maxmind score, the risk goes from 0 to 100, where 0 is riskless and 100 is almost certainly a fraud. We are using this for TrustRatings as a way to adjust ballot-stuffing using bots or proxies. I won't comment on any particular group because last time I did, the moderators considered it off-topic and removed my post. My goodness.

 

[Paul]

Regarding this poll:

• Judging by voter timezone, favorites appear to be somewhat regional.
• [This metric was requested by @JB Lions.] Among voters who registered at least 365 days ago and who have at least 300 posts, the top five results are:
  1. 38 - NameSeal
  2. 25 - DNprotect
  3. 20 - NameProtector
  4. 17 - Assurer
  5. 8 - NameAssured
• [This metric was requested by @oldtimer.] Among voters who registered at least 90 days ago and who have at least 25 posts, the top five results are:
  1. 49 - NameSeal
  2. 33 - DNprotect
  3. 32 - NameProtector
  4. 21 - Assurer
  5. 11 - NameAssured
• Four votes came from people who registered after this thread was created.
• The accounts that voted clearly represent distinct people, and they're mostly established members. I do not see any evidence of "ballot stuffing".
• The following URLs frequently appear in the Referer header for requests to this thread:
  • https://www.nairaland.com/3430037/what-make-money-online/786
  • https://www.nairaland.com/3430037/what-make-money-online/780
  • https://www.nairaland.com/3430037/what-make-money-online/782
  • https://www.nairaland.com/3430037/what-make-money-online/784
  • https://www.nairaland.com/3430037/what-make-money-online/783

NamePros doesn't (and can't) prevent people from sharing their opinions and encouraging each other to vote. These are real people casting real votes; it's not like they registered here just to vote. There's simply overlap between NamePros and that community.

 

[TCK]

I think we are taking polls too seriously here.

If you believe that vettedname.com is a bad choice, don’t blame the domain owner, blame whoever selected it for the poll as, apparently, it is one of the finalists.

And if the expectation is that the domain with the most votes, wins, then asking friends and family to vote for it is not surprising. No reason to get upset.

IMO, this is not how to choose a domain for a project. You can invite people to submit domains but you should have the experience (between you and the team) to know which name is the best fit. Asking the public will always have slanted and subjective leaning and be limited by individual expertise.

 

[Paul]

It's pretty clear people registered exactly for that, just to vote. And the solutions that would help were posted about earlier, not sure if it was in one of the many posts that were deleted. Join date plus post count. Other forums do this with polls, I have done this with polls to knock out most of that kind of thing. You can only vote if you joined the forum 1 month, 2 months, whatever. ago. Minimum post count of 100, 500, 1000, whatever.

I can very clearly see that the overwhelming majority of people did not register just to vote. They are established members.

 

[Paul]

We can simply click on some the names and look at post count. I didn't say the "overwhelming majority" I stated a fact, that some joined just to vote. That's the truth. There are a lot of 0 and 1 post voters from Africa/Algiers. I just picked a random 5, the last 5, 3 of them are 0 posts.

Again, only 4 voters registered after the poll started, so we can safely put an upper limit of 4 on the number of people who registered exclusively to vote. That's a very small number.

Please stop speculating about the integrity of this poll. There is simply no evidence at this time that the poll was manipulated. There's nothing wrong with people encouraging each other to vote, which is all I see happening here.

 

[Paul]

Again, I said there is no way to totally eliminate this and I've posted this many times now, and not once have you addressed this. Why do you think other forums, set join date/post count limits? I've done this myself. If you had a favorite domaining tool poll and the owner of 1 tool, got all his employees, friends and family to come vote for the poll vs. a poll where the voters had to have a min join date, 300 minimum post count. Which poll would be a more accurate picture?

As I mentioned before, it depends what you're trying to measure.

Here's what we get if we limit it to voters with >= 300 posts who have been registered for >= 365 days:

select count(*), r.response from xf_poll_vote v inner join xf_poll_response r using (poll_response_id) inner join xf_user u using (user_id) where v.poll_id = 4157 and u.message_count >= 300 and u.register_date <= (1569387806 - 365 * 24 * 60 * 60) group by v.poll_response_id order by count(*) desc;
+----------+--------------------+
| count(*) | response           |
+----------+--------------------+
|       38 | NameSeal.com       |
|       25 | DNprotect.com      |
|       20 | NameProtector.com  |
|       17 | Assurer.com        |
|        8 | NameAssured.com    |
|        7 | NameSafeguard.com  |
|        6 | NameSquare.com     |
|        6 | NameAssurance.com  |
|        5 | VettedName.com     |
|        5 | NameSurety.com     |
|        4 | NameCertify.com    |
|        3 | NameInspection.com |
|        3 | NameLegit.com      |
|        3 | NameRoot.com       |
|        3 | NameFax.com        |
|        3 | NameNotary.com     |
|        3 | NomTrust.com       |
|        2 | NameSoldier.com    |
|        2 | NameValidate.com   |
|        1 | Trusturo.com       |
|        1 | NameCertain.com    |
|        1 | CrucialNames.com   |
|        1 | NameCleared.com    |
+----------+--------------------+

 

[oldtimer]

Everyone here is putting their focus on fraud and intentional manipulation of the Poll, I believe that we should give people the benefit of the doubt and focus more on educating them and providing them with clear guidelines on what would be okay and what would be considered unacceptable by the majority of members here when voting. In my opinion the clear guidelines plus the minimum requirements to vote will drastically cut down on false results, why not try it and see.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

Just for the sake of argument , to @JB Lions and anyone else who believe there should be strict requirements on people voting, how can you make sure other members will not be doing exactly this and get support from members who they are good friends with and bypass such strict requirements?

You might have not liked the support the owner of that domain got from his people or anyone else, but there is no way to 100% avoid such thing , and yes, there is nothing wrong with this since it is like elections. People ask for support to get the result they want. Think of petitioning.

Also, @Paul Buonopane said only 4 members signed up after this thread was started. These discussions have taken the thread of topic.

 

[Ategy]

@Rob Monster .. As much as that would be great .. I think what you're asking for is somewhat beyond the scope of what NamePros could and probably should do. Particularly since your "naming contests" are pretty unique. Also, a big part of the problem is that to date, you've always gone with the domain with the most votes .. hence incentivizing people (who have never seen you skip over a top vote-getter) to get as many votes as possible.


I did look a bit at the Nigerian forum in question, and a couple of people there brought up a very valid point. Namely that it's not indicated anywhere that submitters aren't allowed to ask their friends, family, colleagues to vote for them. Yes, you'd think in a contest where people are supposed to vote for the best name, people would vote for the best name, but people in all kinds of online "best picture" or "best video" contests are always encouraged to invite their friends and family to vote (usually because the website in question wants more registrations, so it's good for their growth even if it's not good for the contest). To be clear though .. that is NOT the situation here.

So in the end, while the submitter should have known better himself, we can't really be too angry with him. More importantly, we really can't blame anyone else who joined and voted for their friend .. there's no indication anywhere that it's not allowed or even that it's not wanted/encouraged (again, most websites usually want more registrations). I never really thought of that .. plus looking at that forum it seems the suggester of VettedName did reach out to you to ask if it was ok to ask his "fellow countrymen to vote for him" .. so in the end while I think think what he did was wrong, we really can't blame him.

I didn't even know who it was until I just checked that forum now and crosslinked his avatar, but I'm sorry @Etinosa for being so harsh on you .. looking at everything as a whole, I see you were just being overly ambitious, and you obviously tried to maximise your chances and you did try to find out if what you did was ok.

That being said .. unfortunately the name really is not a good one for the reasons I mentioned here, so while I personally feel really bad for you because of the obvious emotional roller-coaster this ordeal has put you through, I hope that @Rob Monster will reach out to you to explain that the domain would never have made the final cut (unless Rob indeed loves it .. in which case .. congratulations).

For the other Nigerians who did vote for VettedName .. since the rules weren't clear, I can't really blame you either. If anything, it shows you care for your friend. That being said .. many of us here take our domains and domaining seriously, so I kindly ask that the next time there is a vote for best domain, that you actually vote for what you feel is truly the best domain.

I also want to reach out to some of the Nigerians on the Nairaland forum and let them know that I read some of their posts, and some of them made some excellent points .. and some showed a lot of honour in saying what some others of them were doing by blindly voting for VettedName was wrong. It takes a lot of guts and integrity to stand up to others within your own community like that when you feel they are doing something wrong!

On that topic, I want you to know more than anything else, that I personally NEVER judge individuals based on anyone's actions but their own. For myself personally, never fear that I will judge you because you are from a certain place or are a certain race. I will only judge you based on your actions .. which is the way it should be for everyone. I invite all of you to come and participate at NamePros. While I most definitely do NOT consider myself an expert domainer yet, I have started to find some success .. so if any of you have any questions or want any pointers or advice, please do not hesitate to reach out to me!


The real story here is that if I and a few others hadn't spoken up, it seems this would have continued unchecked ... but ...

MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY ... if the domain wasn't so obviously a bad choice, we might never had noticed "enhanced friend/associate voting" or brigading as I think you put it. For all we know there could be several others who did the same thing, but because their domains are a little bit stronger, we simply have no way of noticing or knowing. Most people in the domain community do have integrity, but just like any large group of people, there are some individuals who do not .. and there most certainly has been a history of mini-groups within the domain community who have cheated, lied, stolen and who WILL break the rules to act strictly in favour of their own self-interest rather than the interest of the industry ... THERE IS NO WAY 100% TO STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING IN FUTURE POLLS WITHOUT MAKING SOME SIGNIFICANT CHANGES!

 

[Paul]

I do think @Paul Buonopane will want to look at the problem of "Ballot stuffing" and "Brigading". The technique that I think is interesting is to use a service like Maxmind that measures the integrity of a user. In the case of Maxmind score, the risk goes from 0 to 100, where 0 is riskless and 100 is almost certainly a fraud. We are using this for TrustRatings as a way to adjust ballot-stuffing using bots or proxies. I won't comment on any particular group because last time I did, the moderators considered it off-topic and removed my post. My goodness.

We have a very strong risk assessment system, and it takes data from Maxmind into account. However, we've found Maxmind's data alone to be inadequate.

As part of this system, we are fairly good at detecting duplicate accounts. There is little chance that any significant ballot stuffing is taking place, at least in the sense of multiple votes from the same person. There could be multiple people voting from the same company, however. It's also possible for someone to have multiple accounts (and cast multiple votes) if they have a gold account.

 

[JB Lions]

These are real people casting real votes; it's not like they registered here just to vote. There's simply overlap between NamePros and that community.

It's pretty clear people registered exactly for that, just to vote. And the solutions that would help were posted about earlier, not sure if it was in one of the many posts that were deleted. Join date plus post count. Other forums do this with polls, I have done this with polls to knock out most of that kind of thing. You can only vote if you joined the forum 1 month, 2 months, whatever. ago. Minimum post count of 100, 500, 1000, whatever.

Just saw the graphic you posted, 50 votes out of 62 from Africa/Algiers. Pretty clear.

 

[Paul]

We can simply click on some the names and look at post count. I didn't say the "overwhelming majority" I stated a fact, that some joined just to vote. That's the truth. There are a lot of 0 and 1 post voters from Africa/Algiers. I just picked a random 5, the last 5, 3 of them are 0 posts.

select count(*) from xf_poll_vote v inner join xf_user u using (user_id) where v.poll_id = 4157 and u.register_date >= (select post_date from xf_thread where thread_id = 1155658);
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        4 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

A total of 4 voters registered after this thread was created.

select count(*) from xf_poll_vote v inner join xf_user u using (user_id) where v.poll_id = 4157 and u.message_count = 0;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        9 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

A total of 9 voters have no posts to their name.

 

[oldtimer]

There is little chance that any significant ballot stuffing is taking place, at least in the sense of multiple votes from the same person. There could be multiple people voting from the same company, however. It's also possible for someone to have multiple accounts (and cast multiple votes) if they have a gold account.

Whenever conducting a poll, it’s very important that nothing is allowed to affect the integrity of that poll. If people lose trust in the results that are indicated by the poll then it becomes pretty much useless. There is a Universal expectation of any kind of polling to be as accurate as possible which goes beyond what is being discussed in this thread. Although polls by nature can never be 100% accurate and the results should not be taken as fact, but with a small percentage that is allowed for error (usually around 1 to 5 percent) they can still give us a good idea as to what we can expect. We also need to keep in mind that people in different parts of the World give different preferences as to a domain being plural or singular and also as to the order of the keywords. So something that might make perfect sense to a group of people in one part of the World might look out of place to people in another part and so we need to view things from a broader perspective as there might be a perfect explanation for something that on the surface looks odd such as a misunderstanding or lack of proper guidelines for casting the votes. On the other hand intentional manipulation of the poll is absolutely wrong and cannot and should not be accepted or be justified in any way or form and we all should take the necessary steps to prevent it from happening as much as possible.

 

[Paul]

Are you suggesting I rigged the poll for NameSeal.com? In fact, I don't think I even bothered to vote.

I explicitly stated that, as far as I can tell, all of the votes are real. I did not say that the poll was manipulated.

I did say NameSeal was popular in Nigeria, which it was:

I also said someone was encouraging people to vote for a specific answer, and I provided links showing where that occurred. Those links appears in a large number of Referer headers for requests to this thread. I did not say anything specific to NameSeal in that context.

Personally, I do not consider anything I've observed to be manipulative.

 

[Internet.Domains]

For the most part it seems there was some campaigning going on. It is no different than what is found in any electoral democracy.

In all fairness, I see more nefarious actions done by Californian politicians.

 

[Paul]

Just a forum thread with the person submitting the name encouraging everybody to go vote for the name, 50/62 voting from that name from Africa. Tell me what other name has that percentage? And again, I didn't say all, but yes, some. Some could have registered before and just had accounts here.

We don't consider that manipulation because we have no way to prevent such things from happening. That is the nature of polls. Someone could just as easily do this in private, and we'd have no way of knowing.

If you're going to hold polls, you have to accept this as a possibility. It's ridiculous to suggest that we can prevent this.

At the bottom of the poll it says:

"Multiple votes are allowed"

Why not expand that and include some more guidelines, a lot of people say that they didn't know that they weren't supposed to vote for a name just to help their friends, it might cut down drastically on false results if rules are clearly indicated at the top and below the poll. Also as I and others had indicated before there should be some minimum requirements for a person to be able to vote such as minimum 3 months membership and minimum of 25 posts. IMO

For the sake of science, here are what the results would be if we were to do that:

Edit: Hold on a sec, updating this; did the query wrong.

Edit 2: Fixed.

Edit 3: Okay, really fixed this time.

select count(*), r.response from xf_poll_vote v inner join xf_poll_response r using (poll_response_id) inner join xf_user u using (user_id) where v.poll_id = 4157 and u.message_count >= 25 and u.register_date <= (1569387806 - 90 * 24 * 60 * 60) group by v.poll_response_id order by count(*) desc;
+----------+--------------------+
| count(*) | response           |
+----------+--------------------+
|       49 | NameSeal.com       |
|       33 | DNprotect.com      |
|       32 | NameProtector.com  |
|       23 | VettedName.com     |
|       21 | Assurer.com        |
|       11 | NameAssured.com    |
|        9 | NameSafeguard.com  |
|        9 | NameAssurance.com  |
|        7 | NameSquare.com     |
|        6 | NameSurety.com     |
|        5 | NameLegit.com      |
|        5 | NameRoot.com       |
|        5 | NameFax.com        |
|        5 | NameCertify.com    |
|        4 | NomTrust.com       |
|        4 | NameNotary.com     |
|        3 | NameInspection.com |
|        3 | NameSoldier.com    |
|        2 | Trusturo.com       |
|        2 | CrucialNames.com   |
|        2 | NameValidate.com   |
|        1 | NameCertain.com    |
|        1 | NameCleared.com    |
+----------+--------------------+

 

[Paul]

That's not right. I just checked NameSeal.com and there are plenty of members that have been here longer than a year with over 300 posts. Not just 1.

Hmm... maybe I did something wrong. I'll try again.

 

[Paul]

That's not right. I just checked NameSeal.com and there are plenty of members that have been here longer than a year with over 300 posts. Not just 1.

Okay, I think I got the queries right this time.

 

[JB Lions]

As I mentioned before, it depends what you're trying to measure.

Here's what we get if we limit it to voters with >= 300 posts who have been registered for >= 365 days:

select count(*), r.response from xf_poll_vote v inner join xf_poll_response r using (poll_response_id) inner join xf_user u using (user_id) where v.poll_id = 4157 and u.message_count >= 300 and u.register_date <= (1569387806 - 365 * 24 * 60 * 60) group by v.poll_response_id order by count(*) desc;
+----------+--------------------+
| count(*) | response           |
+----------+--------------------+
|       38 | NameSeal.com       |
|       25 | DNprotect.com      |
|       20 | NameProtector.com  |
|       17 | Assurer.com        |
|        8 | NameAssured.com    |
|        7 | NameSafeguard.com  |
|        6 | NameSquare.com     |
|        6 | NameAssurance.com  |
|        5 | VettedName.com     |
|        5 | NameSurety.com     |
|        4 | NameCertify.com    |
|        3 | NameInspection.com |
|        3 | NameLegit.com      |
|        3 | NameRoot.com       |
|        3 | NameFax.com        |
|        3 | NameNotary.com     |
|        3 | NomTrust.com       |
|        2 | NameSoldier.com    |
|        2 | NameValidate.com   |
|        1 | Trusturo.com       |
|        1 | NameCertain.com    |
|        1 | CrucialNames.com   |
|        1 | NameCleared.com    |
+----------+--------------------+

Big difference.

NameSeal.com - 38
DNprotect.com - 25
NameProtector.com - 20
Assurer.com - 17
.......
VettedName.com - 5

This one looks better to me. The current poll, VettedName.com is winning. Put some minimum checks in place and it only has 5 votes.

 

[Paul]

Having too strict of requirements will deprive new domainers from voting who maybe just weren't aware of what is okay and what is not when voting, so I still believe that a modest minimum requirements PLUS adequate guidelines is the way to go so we won't leave good people who didn't know any better out. IMO

Can we discuss this elsewhere? I've provided a lot of aggregate information on the polls; that's all I can do. If you want to discuss making changes to how polls work in general, that's off-topic for this thread.

Update by moderator: These posts have been moved to their own thread.

 

[AmiraB]

Reference was made to if he could ask people to vote his name...The response was positive,ALLOWED.

If it wasn't allowed,He most likely wouldn't have gone soliciting votes..

 

[equity78]

@Paul Buonopane thank you for all the effort you put in here of course you could not do more, this is beyond nonsense to imply anything else.

First off @Rob Monster started the poll so it's his poll, each person who starts a poll can provide the terms they want.

Let's keep it real the Namepros poll for The anonymous search engine didn't get picked by the Namepros top vote getter SearchIT.com beat Toki.com easily here, it was the vote on GAB where Toki.com won. https://www.namepros.com/threads/br...search-aggregator.1150560/page-6#post-7383378

I don't think anyone else will be running polls like this, most people might want some feedback but for their money, their brand they are the final say on the name.

 

[Cal2]

You might have not liked the support the owner of that domain got from his people or anyone else, but there is no way to 100% avoid such thing , and yes, there is nothing wrong with this since it is like elections. People ask for support to get the result they want. Think of petitioning.

Also, @Paul Buonopane said only 4 members signed up after this thread was started. These discussions have taken the thread of topic.

This isn't politics. In my world, there is something wrong with this, in this instance.

But I can understand the desire to win on this, even if that means messing with the ballot box.

Rob is quite astute, imo. I'm sure he wouldn't have bought into the voting results, so in ways all this is academic. But how far to trust some people in the future, some have revealed themselves.

 

[equity78]

I didn't call your comments and suggestions "beyond nonsense",

I am just responding to you trying to degrade all the constructive opinions and suggestions that are made here by me and others, whether they are practical or implementable that's beside the point. They should not be called beyond nonsense.

Well to be fair I was not attacking anyone, it seemed to me that @Paul Buonopane was befuddled and I will give you on using nonsense in the wrong way, I meant it like "Paul it's unreasonable for someone to think you could do more. Look Oldtimer this is because there is money involved it got this heated. No one ever got skeptical over other polls. I don't think Rob set it up best. That's just my opinion not that Rob or anyone has to agree with me.

I think people made constructive comments to a poll starter, IMO Rob should have made clear the winner of this vote does not guarantee it will be picked. No multiple votes.

 

[wwwweb]

And there was never a guarantee that the vote getting was going to be picked anyway. As I mentioned Rob did not do that for the smart search aggregator.

Of course not, we all know that would be silly, just one more indication level this poll gives them that’s all, we all know Rob, and his team have the necessary skills to brand a product of their development, but for someone to make this effort they thought otherwise. It’s just ill intent, obviously best name deserves to win, but someone’s attempt to stuff the ballot box just leaves a bad taste that’s all.

This is the thing 99.9% of domainers are honest people, it’s that .1% that enter this industry that ruin things for everyone.