Prevent self-voting on polls?

[daijdjan]

Hi everyone!

We've recently migrated our old forum to ProBoards and are quite pleased with it, but there is one issue I hope to maybe get some help.

We hold a weekly contest where each user may submit an entry, then we hold a poll (using the members' names for the poll's answers) and the winner may set the next challenge's theme. These polls are hosted by the staff (in general the only people able to create polls in the first place) exclusively.

Looking some other support threads I already know:

(a) We cannot edit polls after creation to "keep things fair" (meaning we cannot add an entry we missed when setting up the poll).

(b) We cannot see our users' votes to not "invade their privacy" (in contrast to being able to see invisible users, IPs and email adresses).

My big question now is: To still being able to keep our polls fair, considering the entry names are our users' names, is it at least somehow possible to generally forbid users to vote for themselves somehow? Or does someone know if there's a plugin created to only accept usernames and then make polls with them like this (couldn't find one, but maybe I missed)?

Big thanks for reading

~DaijDjan

PS: Sorry if I sound a bit salty above, but I've never ever heard anyone make such arguments concerning this topic and I literally cannot wrap my head around these reasonings. Still, ranting wasn't what I wanted to do (well, maybe a little bit, tbh ) - I'm just trying to find a way to host the polls as fair as they are supposed to be.

[Craig]

Hi

Unfortunately, that is not something which is currently achievable inasmuch as the poll would not be able to determine - or rather - match the poll option to the member voting. This is something i could add as a feature request for consideration, but it is not something currently possible, sorry.

[daijdjan]

As I feared. Still, big thanks for your quick response (like, seriously! ). I'd really like you to add it as feature request if possible.

[Craig]

Apr 9, 2018 5:42:59 GMT -8 daijdjan said:

As I feared. Still, big thanks for your quick response (like, seriously! ). I'd really like you to add it as feature request if possible.

Done

[Kami]

For whatever its worth, the invasion of privacy issue may not be quite what you are envisioning.

The concern here is that there is potential for abuse if a member votes "wrong", if someone is able to see exactly what was voted for by whom. By disallowing this, this eliminates any possibility for direct backlash to users based on their vote. The privacy being violated is being able to see exact details of a user's actions.

Similarly to having access to who voted but not what they voted for, while we have access to invisible users (a staff only function), emails, and IPs, we are only able to see if a user is online but not where they are or what they are doing.

[daijdjan]

First of all big thanks for your response

Guess I do get your point for the most part, even if it is pretty much a non-issue in our case (we've done more than 200 contests this way while being able to check for selfvoting in the past).

Still, if there ever is a way to link votes to usernames, we'll definitely use it

[Kami]

Apr 11, 2018 12:11:52 GMT -8 daijdjan said:

First of all big thanks for your response :)

Guess I do get your point for the most part, even if it is pretty much a non-issue in our case (we've done more than 200 contests this way while being able to check for selfvoting in the past).

Still, if there ever is a way to link votes to usernames, we'll definitely use it ;)

Oh I'm sure you're correct in that it would be a non issue in your case. It would be a non issue in ours too.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said universally across the PB service. I remember during v4 when admins were able to change the email for a user... I'm sure you'd never do anything untoward to steal your user's account, and neither would I, but that did in fact happen so often that PB had to remove that option. It's one of those things where even if a majority if users would use a feature responsibly, the potential for misuse makes it an unappealing addition when looking at the big picture.

I agree that it would be useful, but I can't see a way to have it without running the aforementioned risks :/