Quote:
Originally Posted by Another Toad
"First, as I stated earlier, the scores as displayed are not accurate. They include votes that are not valid and which dilute the results to prevent people from being unduly influenced by the scores. The invalid votes were purposely inserted and will not be included in the final totals. Additionally, I'm inserting these invalid votes every single day, so nobody will know how many real votes there actually are until the competition concludes."
Wouldn't it be easier to keep the results hidden until the voting period has ended? Why go to the trouble of making up fake interim results?
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Kidd, don't worry about that. Most likely, those votes won't even be stored in the database because it's so obvious what happened that the software automatically handled them.
As to the results being hidden, that's pretty difficult because the star rating system is third-party software. Attempting to add a feature to hide the results could result in a bug that shuts down voting altogether. That could affect the results, so I don't want to change any code that has to do with the rating system. On the other hand, it will only take one query to delete all the bad rows from the database when voting ends.