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TIME Daily's most recent poll was another hot-button issue: "A Kurdish Homeland? Should the United Nations support the creation of a Kurdish state?" Kurdish terrorist/guerrilla leader (depending on your point of view) Abdulla Ocalan had just been nabbed by the Turkish authorities, Kurds across Europe were storming embassies and setting themselves on fire, and the Turkish online community evidently figured the best defense was a good offense. TIME Daily writers were awash in form-letter hate mail with subject lines like "I am protesting you" and "demand for your apologize" -- and the poll was under assault.
"They couldn't change the tallies," says Martino. "They weren't hackers. But they did have a server." The assault came from a Turkish university, and students were armed with a CPU to match TIME Daily's -- the university's powerful server. The bots were identified and blocked by the IP and cookie-based defenses, but they churned out so many voting attempts that defending against them overwhelmed TIME Daily's own server. Access slowed to a crawl until the tech team was forced to ban the computers of the entire university from accessing our site.
So why post polls at all? Because they're one of the best ways we know for a news site to get its readers involved, passionate and coming back for more -- not an easy feat in these jaded days. The more controversial the topic, the better the poll. That doesn't change just because it's only the opinion of the site's visitors, whose opinion shows up in the tallies. President Clinton's lofty national approval ratings in conventional, scientific surveys were definitely not reflected in TIME Daily's own polls -- a twist that caused our voters no end of consternation. But that's the Web's own "caveat surfer," and it's probably preferable to fielding calls from Gallup in the middle of dinner. No, the online polls are not indicative of popular opinion. But unlike Gallup's, they're indicative of your opinion, and, if you've got one, TIME Daily doesn't care who you are or what country you're from. Sophisticates and barbarians alike are always welcome at our gates -- but robots seeking suffrage will be dealt with harshly.