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Monday, 7 April 2003

Voteserver 2.0 [lurks]

Over a year ago, blimey no make that over 2 years ago, I wrote a Rebol script which acted as e-mail vote server. Basically you sent it an e-mail with particular syntax in the body and it would post a vote to any e-mail address you want (typically a mailing list). Folks would then reply to this and after a certain number of votes were obtained, it would post the results.
It was kinda nifty but like the Iraqi Information Minister, it had 'issues'. Firstly people invariably monged up sending of mails so they posted their vote to the mailing lists. Secondly, people couldn't be arsed doing that. Then there was the concept that the person proposing the vote would specify the max votes before it was posted and they'd not be enough votes so the results would never get posted. Oh and the tally shit didn't work properly and the server was a stand-alone script that had to be run on a box full time.
It's been on my to-do list for awhile but I've resurrected the voteserver in a vastly improved form. Now it has a passworded web page to set up the votes. The e-mails it posts have links to vote on each option so people just need to click on their vote. It also has a scheduler in it so that you just specify the number of hours the vote will run before it posts the results. Oh and now the data goes in a MySQL database and Rebot handles polling of the data periodically. It handles winners/draws properly too :)
Obviously the EED/UKGamer posse are welcome to use it. The web page just has a pull down for those default e-mail addresses. Come ask in #EED for the password. At some stage I'm going to put in the Usenet posting code, should be fun on a couple of the NGs I hang out on. Any other suggestions for improvement gratefully received.

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