But I became suspicious, asked
our webmasters if there were unusual request patterns, and it turns out
there have been many http requests made from just a few IP addresses, that
have some obvious non-browser user-agent headers ... strongly suggesting
some "ballot stuffing" with some kiddie scripts. While this voting
system and process was always meant to be informal (and not especially
secure) I'm afraid I was naive and it has just been too tempting for some
not to play with it, to the point of manipulation. And, the problem is,
there's no way to tell how extensive the problem is. There's not that much
tracing or logging done ... and it'd be pretty easy for someone to write
scripts that were just a little bit more sophisticated, spoof the
user agent, and we'd not be able to detect those as fake.
So, what to do? Denis said he could
(probably on Monday) add some logic to the polling mechanism to require
a bugzilla login, so we'd be a little more confident that people voted
just once. And I don't think it'd be bad restrict to only those with bugzilla
accounts. But, if we did that, should we start over? Just give a few days
for re-voting or extend the period for a few more weeks? Or, should we,
the planning council, just ignore the votes and decide a good name ourselves?
I don't think moving to doodle is much help, if I understand doodle's system,
since that just required the user to enter a name, and we never did check
that those names are "real" in any way.
I don't much like any of the alteratives,
so I'm hoping some of you have a clear idea or opinion of what the best
course of action would be.