Tonight’s release brings the much-requested feature of paged search results.  This means you can now dig deeper, beyond the initial 50 results.  It may seem like a minor thing, but for some people, it was a major irritation to be limited to the first 50 hits.  It could be especially frustrating if you were looking for an older poll.  In any case, this is no longer a problem, so enjoy!

We have always tried to weed out inappropriate content at Mister Poll. Despite our efforts, more and more questionable polls and messages have been creeping in. Mostly, it’s the messages. There are just too many postings for us to keep up with them all ourselves. We do sometimes get helpful emails from you, pointing out a message or poll that really needs to be removed. Thank you for that. We jump on those as quickly as we can.

Lately though, it’s just not enough. We’ve been quite alarmed at some of the things we’ve found recently. We’ve seen examples of people encouraging child abuse and molestation, trading child pornography, and enticing under-aged kids to email privately in order to trade sexual stories and/or pictures.

This has to stop.

We simply will not stand by and allow Mister Poll to become a home for online predators and other dangerous deviants. Healthy discussions about consensual adult sex is one thing, but these have gone far beyond that. I know this will be an ongoing battle, but we’re making some changes that I think will help.

The first step we’ve taken is to make it much easier for you to notify us about any inappropriate content that you find. Every poll and every message now has a Flag link. Whenever you see something that you feel should be removed, please click this link. It will automatically notify us of the content, so we can review it for removal.

We have a few more changes in the works as well, but I think this first one is the most important. The more people we have looking out for dangerous situations, the more effective we will be in fighting them. If you have other suggestions about how to clean things up, please do let us know.

Thank you!

A few weeks ago, we quietly added user profiles to the Mister Poll web site. Some of you may have noticed that user names are now clickable throughout the site. The profiles themselves are not too fancy, since we don’t ask very many questions about you when you create an account. The really useful part is that you can see a list of polls the user has created as well as the messages they have posted. As an example, take a look at my profile page:

http://www.misterpoll.com/users/mister%20poll

As you can see, I don’t create many polls myself, but I do post a lot of messages.

If you look at your own profile, you may see that not all of your polls are listed. For most visitors, your public profile only shows polls that have been submitted and approved for the Mister Poll directory or search engine. Similarly, it only shows messages you have posted on polls meeting the same criteria. This is done for the same purpose that we have the review process in the first place — To keep kids and the more conservative adults from stumbling upon mature content.

If you happen to be logged into an account with uncensored access, you will see even more when viewing a user’s profile. Any polls that have been classified as adult will also be included, as will any messages posted on such polls. The only items excluded will be polls that either have not been submitted for review, which the author presumably wants to keep private, or polls that our reviewers have rejected as entirely inappropriate, broken, etc.

That’s all for our initial version of user profiles. We’ll likely expand them a bit in the future, and we’d love to hear what additions you’d like to see. Post your ideas as comments to this article or over in the official Mister Poll forum. Keep in mind we’re not looking to build the next MySpace or Facebook here. This should mainly help you find other content created by your fellow users, stay connected with them, etc.

I can finally say it. Mister Poll 2.0 has launched! We made it through more than a year of sporadic development and two months of open beta, and it’s finally here. Wow. I’m sure this feels much more profound to me than it does to you, but there were times I wondered if it would ever be finished. Quite a few times. It’s nice to get this much needed sense of relief and accomplishment.

Thanks to those of you who helped us test during the beta period. Your efforts definitely made this a better release. A great thanks to all of you who have used Mister Poll over the last 10 years! You make this site possible, and your suggestions are what shaped this new beginning.

I have more release details to wrap up before I can sleep, so I’ll keep this post brief. Explore the new web site and have fun discovering what’s new. Nearly everything is improved in some way. The whole thing was rewritten from the ground up, so the changes are far more than skin deep. Some of the previous blog posts mention a few details, and I’ll do my best to cover more in the near future.

In the meantime, here’s to another 10 years!

http://www.misterpoll.com/

Oh man, it feels good to say that. At long last, I am proud to announce that the beta of our new Mister Poll web site is now online! It’s taken so much longer than I had initially hoped, but I’m quite happy with the end result. The real question is, will you be?

Before I send you over there, let me say a few quick words about this beta. First, it’s a beta, so there will likely be a few imperfections. Hopefully nothing major is still lurking out there, but if you do find something, please let us know. Also, don’t limit your comments to things that break. If something feels awkward, doesn’t make sense, or you simply have a suggestion on how to improve it, speak up. We want to hear about that too.

Also, this beta site is running completely separate from the live Mister Poll site. Nothing you do on the beta will effect the live site in any way, and vice versa. This includes making new polls, changing existing polls, voting, posting messages, changing your password, etc. The two sites are completely separate. The beta site was seeded with a copy of the data from the live site as of early morning October 1st, 2007. When beta ends and we launch for real, we’ll start over and the latest live data will be re-converted one final time.

As far as what’s new, in a nutshell: a lot! In addition to the snazzy new look, almost every feature is improved in some way. I will post additional articles talking about the new features in more detail, but for now, go explore!

http://beta.misterpoll.com/

I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Thanks! I hope you like it!

I’m looking for a few advanced pollsters who would be interested in shaping how our upcoming results export feature will function. The export is how you will gain access to all of the individual votes rather than just the summary data. Presumably this will be mostly of interest to data geeks who want to sift through it to find cross-question associations such as, “How did people who voted for option B in question 1 end up voting in question 5?”

I’m a programmer and database person, so if I were going to crunch a bunch of data, I would probably want to load it into a database and run queries against it. One of our export options will likely be geared toward being loaded into a relational database. This is right up my alley, so I don’t expect much difficulty with that option. However, I know there are a lot of you who would much prefer to use a spreadsheet of some kind. I can use Excel, but I am no advanced spreadsheet guru. I’m having trouble guessing just what somebody would want to do with these results in a spreadsheet, and how the data should best be arranged to let them accomplish that.

So, if having access to all of the voting details in a spreadsheet sounds like your cup of tea, please speak up in the comments on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you would use the data, especially within Excel. Once I get a good grasp on that, I’ll work on a proposed spreadsheet format to support your goals. When I have a sample ready, I’ll ask for your feedback on that as well.

Thanks!

Remember that Mister Poll 2.0 project I mentioned eons ago? I’ve finally been making real progress on the development again the last few months, and we’re truly closing in on completion. For the web site, I’m down to my final 8 tasks. Woo hoo! We’ll still have to do internal testing after that, but we’re getting quite close.

It’s been a long and demanding road, but it feels good to finally have the end in sight.
I’m not setting a date yet, but I thought you might like a bit of good news after the long drought.

Yes, this afternoon, I received an official response from my StopBadware.org appeal:

It appears that your site no longer hosts or distributes badware. We
have informed Google of this finding.

Please note that we will be retesting your website at periodic intervals
in order to monitor that it remains free from badware. If we find that
you are hosting or distributing badware in the future, the appeals
process may take considerably longer than the original appeal.

My Translation:

Oh, well, we didn’t find anything wrong with your site after all. That whole blacklisting thing wasn’t really founded. We may still block your site again at any time though, and your future appeals for our repeated mistakes will take considerably longer than this one did.

Gee, thanks for nothing.

I received a comment yesterday from Kristie, who runs a dog blog called Ask Chewie. Her web site is now being blocked by Google with the same “malware” advisory that plagued Mister Poll last week. The story is the same. She discovered the block due to an unexplained and severe drop in her traffic, with no notice or communications from Google or StopBadware.org. Will this unreasonable conduct never end? If you’d like to help Kristie, send your complaints to appeals@stopbadware.org and help@google.com.

It’s time to give a bit of credit where it’s due. My original blog post about Google and StopBadware.org generated some attention, and two people from those organizations responded with a helpful attitude. Matt Cutts from Google posted a comment pointing out a Mister Poll user who was trying to exploit our system. Earlier this evening, John Palfrey from StopBadware.org emailed me with news that his group is currently working with its partners to send me specific information about what triggered the badware advisory in the first place. I don’t think it’s officially either of these gentlemen’s jobs to handle communication of this nature, but I certainly appreciate them stepping in and lending a hand where others fell down. Thanks. I’m hopeful that this situation will be resolved on a positive note and that a more inclusive official process will result.