The year 1999 was a big one for polls here at TIME.com. We shouldn't have been
surprised. Pre-millennial fever seemed to add an extra edge to all the
passions that motivate people to express themselves — political tension,
national pride, economic disparity, religious fervor — and our polls
were chum in the water for those with an overwhelming need to make themselves
heard. Make themselves heard they did, turning out in record numbers
for our polls, periodically flooding our tiny newsroom with ravenous
vote-generating robots, angry e-mails and even threats of eternal
damnation. The polls that touched a nerve and set off huge responses gave us
insights into the topics that can really motivate a group — or an entire nation. Here are the highlights from a very interesting year
in the world of interactive media.
Ask a provocative question, as we did in our Person of the Century poll(we are looking for "that person who, for better or worse, most influenced the course of history over the past 100 years"), and you can expect to get a provocative response. The excitement started immediately — and a clear leader emerged. Einstein? Gandhi? JFK? No, Mick Foley. The day after the poll launched, a robot attacked and cast thousands of votes for Foley, a professional wrestler. What is a robot, you ask? Robots, or "'bots," as we call them, are automatic voting programs that come into our web site and vote over and over on our polls. Why do we care about them? Because they ruin the fun for everybody. Heavy robot activity can radically alter the vote tally, slow down our web site and crash other polls unrelated to the one under attack. Just because our polls are unscientific doesn't mean that we will allow them to become a joke.
After the wrestling robot attacked, we removed the robotic votes and reposted the tallies with Mr. Foley no longer in the top 20. All was quiet for several weeks until a large web site devoted to the grapplin' game caught wind of the story and whipped legions of loyal fans into a frenzy by misquoting a TIME spokesman as saying that we had removed Foley because "he had made no significant contribution to society." Needless to say, this enraged wrestlemaniacs the world over, and thousands of angry e-mails flooded in from all over the country. "Time SUCKS!, Foley ROCKS!" and similar messages dominated our mailboxes for weeks. The fact that 99 percent of his votes were generated by a vote-casting robot in a short 12-hour span was lost on the fans, and we had to just batten the hatches, respond as best we could, and weather the storm.