The Vegas Poll That Went Awry

I noticed on Dave McKee's blog that he was touting the fact that he's been "short-listed" for best Vegas blog by the folks at Las Vegas CityLife in their annual reader survey. He's a regular contributor and didn't disclose that in that blog item, but OK. Anyhow, I was curious, of course, to see if this blog had received a similar honor, so I headed to the site on Saturday to check it out.

Sadly, the site accused me of trying to double-vote, see?


Uh, no. I have not. My memory's bad, but it's not THAT bad. So I tried again on other computers, tried cleaning out the cookies, tried other browsers. Alas, still no luck. Then I went to Twitter and asked others to try it and everyone else who did had the same problem.

Now this poll had been up for MORE THAN A WEEK (according to McKee's post) and has had a full-page ad in the print edition promoting it, so I was a little surprised when CityLife editor Steve Sebelius Tweeted back that he'd "check" on the problem. That meant that a major Vegas publication had had a broken poll for ages and nobody bothered to tell anyone? Nobody over there even noticed? When there's a broken link on this blog, I get a half-dozen emails on it within an hour. But OK.

Anyhow, just now, I tried again. And voila, I got in. Sort of. I answered the first 50 questions but, when I tried to advance to the next part, it froze. In fact, it's been 20 minutes now and the site is STILL saying:


Fascinating. I suspect this is the work of the crack Stephens Media tech staff that brought us search bars that, a week into the fab Review-Journal redesign, still don't show the user what he/she is typing. Try it yourself! See?


Saddest part is once CityLife actually fixes its poll problems, I betcha a deck of Chippendales playing cards it's going to remember my IP address and tell me...


P.S. How does Dave McKee know he's short-listed for best blog if the poll's not in the print edition and nobody can get to that part of the poll online? (I still don't know if this blog has been nominated.)

P.P.S. I'll have more to say about the poll once I can actually take all of it, but I'm already perturbed. Some of the items short-listed aren't even open anymore and there's no opportunity to write-in a choice. The latter makes the entire poll, already simply a promotional exercise, even more irrelevant and gamed.