We’d like to use this post as a place to discuss the poll in general – so please leave a comment here if you have something to say about it. We’re listening.

OK, last year’s Best of the Chippewa Valley reader poll was long. Very long. Many of you asked it to be shortened. But we didn’t feel we could shorten it without cutting out tons of important stuff. So we kept it long but found a polling system that would allow you to just vote on whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, without having to complete a giant form.

We also wanted to keep things open-ended like last year, allowing you to write in your own answers. Allowing other people to vote on your responses seemed like a great addition. So Yayboo.com fit the bill. We knew there would be a few kinks in how it works, and that some responses would battle back and forth for placement, but there are comparable kinks in all polling options.

Most of the negative feedback we’ve heard comes down, directly or indirectly, to the polling results being visible in real time, and how voters (especially businesses) react to that. Despite the obvious problems, we still stand behind the openness of the poll. We didn’t expect the level of tampering seen in certain categories, but we’ll deal with it.

Given that Yayboo.com is our polling system this year, and that we stand behind it, here’re some specific comments:

• Some businesses and restaurants have rallied their customers, garnering tons of votes, allowing them to top certain categories. This isn’t cheating. It’s hard to argue with an establishment that has achieved that kind of customer loyalty.
• On the other hand, some individuals have definitely cheated. And we can tell. The people running Yayboo.com are working with us (and have been since this all started) to identify the different ways to “game” the system and those cheats will be factored into our the final Best Of placements.

Please let us know what you think about all this by commenting on this post.