How Advanced Poll 2.0.3 Textfile SSI Works

After a fair number of hours struggling to understand how Advanced Poll 2.0.3 with textfiles and ssi (using a shtml page) works, here's what happens. This explains a lot of questions in the forum about lack of results, inability to vote, cookies, etc.

When you vote, a cookie is placed on your machine which is set to expire in four days. This setting cannot be changed in the admin part of the program. With the cookie on your machine, you cannot vote again. If check IP table is not set in your general settings, you will not see the vote result when you vote (I think this is a bug). Since AOL uses the same IP for millions of addresses, I have set the IP block to a very short time (0.01 hours). When this is set, the results will show immediately. When the IP block expires in 30 seconds, another person from that IP can vote. However, if the cookie is on your machine, you will not be able to vote for 4 days. Unfortunately, when you try to vote with the cookie on your machine, the vote button clicks, but nothing happens. You must click the hyperlink "view results' to see the results. The script should show you the results page with the line "you have already voted," as it does with the IP blocked. However, it does not. This is another bug, in my estimation.

Whether these observations apply to the DB script or even to the php version of the textfile script, I don't know.

For some reason, the textfile version of Advanced Poll 2.0.3 shows the label 2.0.2 in the admin panel and on the polls.

I would encourage the author to fix these bugs in his nice script. It shouldn't be too hard to do.

You can see my poll at www.full-life.org.

I realize this post is over a year old but I am having exactly the same issues and was wondering if anyone had ever figured out a way around them.

The ssi behavior of the polls is quite bad. The average user can't see the results unless they click on the 'view results' page. If I turn IP checking off, even though the cookies are installed in my browser, I still can't see the results without clicking on view results. I just keep getting the vote input page over and over.

Basically this ssi/texfile option is only working for people with fixed IP addresses, which is a small fraction of users.

Any updates would be appreciated.

Michelle

Set the locking time out for the IP table and the cookie expiration time to the same value. The cookie expiration time must be set in poll_cookie.php. I have the times set to 0.5 hr. Seems to work for me now. Let us know if it works for you.

Thanks for the quick response.

I had the 2 timeouts set to the same (very high) value. Doing what you suggested, and clearing my cache and cookies, seems to have solved the issue of not showing the results after voting. However, won't it present the poll input page again in half an hour? The behavior we want is to vote once and then see the results whenever you return to the polling page, unless the user defeats the mechanism by deleting their cookies. I would happily turn off the IP tracking altogether and just rely on cookies but it doesn't seem to work.

Our page is http://www.stargate-sg1-solutions.com/pollbooth.shtml

Thanks again,
Michelle

How many people stay on a website for 30 minutes, not many. The exact time chosen is a compromise to prevent people from voting multiple times and letting people from the same IP address (aol users etc) be able to vote within a reasonable amount of time. I am sure you can enter some other value, but very small and very large values seem to cause problems. Obviously the development of Advanced Poll has ceased, so we are just trying to make the best of a somewhat flawed free script.

I didn't realize development had ceased. Thanks for that info.

I wonder if the php behavior is better than the ssi one, or are they the same?