Bots spamming polls? Why?

[Alpha1]

Guests have permission to vote on polls on my site. I just found out that just now many of my polls received thousands of votes on all answers.
The only reason I can think of is to strain the servers, though that is kind of silly. Its weird.

 

[AndyB]

Guests have permission to vote on polls on my site.

This is not a good idea. There is nothing prevent someone from writing a program to vote thousands of times on a single poll.

 

[Alpha1]

In general this has worked well. There is nothing to gain by skewing poll results.

 

[TPerry]

In general this has worked well. There is nothing to gain by skewing poll results.

Even if there is "nothing to gain", folks do that kind of stuff all the time. Not to mention the fact that it makes the poll (statistically) absolutely useless - which defeats the purpose of a poll in the first place.

 

[Alpha1]

Polls worked fine for over 10 year with guest voting on. As long as there was nothing to gain we saw no significant deviations. Until this week.
Why do you consider guest voting to make the poll statistically absolutely useless?

 

[TPerry]

Polls worked fine for over 10 year with guest voting on. As long as there was nothing to gain we saw no significant deviations. Until this week.
Why do you consider guest voting to make the poll statistically absolutely useless?

Because you cannot ascertain if 1 person has voted 100 times. That will skew the statistics on the returns of the poll. I guess if the question pertaining to the poll is useless be the results don't really matter.
For me, I want realistic statistics on a poll.

As for nothing to "gain"...sure their is.. the results that they want even if that may not support the majority but only a vocal minority.

 

[whynot]

Why do you consider guest voting to make the poll statistically absolutely useless?

Yes: 10 votes
No: 2 votes

I vote on "No" 20 times as a guest:
Yes:10 votes
No: 22 votes

(Proxy)

 

[Alpha1]

While I am sure that this happens, in general the guest voting patterns do resemble member voting patterns. It does depends though, if the poll is about something that people feel strongly about, or if there is something to gain/loose, then guest voting is not useful.

For example:
Which do you prefer:
1. pie
2. cake
3. ice cream

Such poll will generally not attract abusive voting

Does god exist:
1 yes
2. no

Such poll will attract abusive voting.

In any case, what was happening in the situation described above is that spam bots where not voting more for specific answers, but were voting equally on all answers. For example on one poll there were 6 answers and the bot added 1950 votes to every answer.