Monday, May 16, 2011

The Monday Poll

I'm going with the most obvious and easiest possible poll this week: Pick the winner of the NPPL Chicago Open--or whatever name they've given it. You've got until midday on Friday to cast your vote. With no webcast to watch and scores updated with the haste of a maple syrup drip in December I could probably give you more time--but I'm not going to. The poll will close about the time the teams start play on Friday. So jump on your favorite bandwagon now, make your pick from the HB results or check the early poll results first so you can vote along with the popular kids. Just make sure you vote before Friday.

Monday Poll in Review
On the near anniversary of the original Monday Poll, which queried your vote as to the lamest MLP site, last week's poll asked you lot to vote on the generic paintball website that sucks the most. Alas, it didn't turn out to be all that much fun. For a number of reasons. At a guess I would say most of you didn't have a clue what most of the websites listed looked like as you aren't quite as cosmopolitan in your paintball website taste as one might have hoped for. Or else you actually have lives--which didn't occur to me until it was too late. So the results aren't a huge surprise although I'm inclined to think most of them are anomalous for one reason or another. Not that it matters. The Monday Poll is not scientific nor intended for any purpose other than my entertainment.
Not that I minded all the votes VFTD received--yeah, that was funny all right, the first ten times--but after that it simply demonstrated a lack of wit along with your default sheep-like tendencies. (Not that I'm passing judgment or anything. Sheep are people too. Kinda.) The "aren't we just so clever" vote for VFTD tallied 13% of the total. (On the off chance you really don't like it all I can say is pearls before swine.) (No, not you. The other guy.)
The other prime voter getters were TechPB (40%), Paintball.com (7%) & PBN (6%). Warpig and P8ntballer.com managed a weak 4% each followed by a couple of handfuls of mostly 1 percenters collecting a few random votes with an honorable mention to M Carter Brown at 3%. What's wrong with this picture? By type the majority of votes went to forums. By and large all the forums run off the same software, look and work the same way and provide the same general services. Under those circumstances the votes should reflect familiarity more than anything else because there isn't really anything else that distinguishes them. Yet TechPB got far and away the most votes. Odds are there was a push promoted by PBN to inundate VFTD with TechPB votes because they could and they wanted to see TechPB "win." If true, that's fine but since the results have clearly been manipulated VFTD is voiding the results and naming a uniquely worthy paintball website as the one that sucks the most.
Congrats to the APPA website. It's an eyesore without equal. And like its creator its pedantic and a pain in the ass. And while it does serve a purpose it also takes your money.
While I'm at a few other sites deserve an honorable mention or two for the various ways they too suck. Warpig is the OG of info sites--and looks older than it is. A face lift wouldn't hurt.
Then there's Facefull's portal to cyberspace. Did anyone ever order the magazine based on what they saw at the website? Apparently not otherwise the recent hibernation wouldn't have been necessary.
And if you slept thru a visit to Paintball.com nobody could really blame you. It's back, it's fresh, it's new and exciting. No, wait, actually it's none of those things. Most of the fresh material hasn't been updated in months and the rest of the content looks like it once appeared in APG before the turn of the last century.
The final honorable mention goes to the Big Bullet aka 68 Caliber. While the Big Bullet does feature more unique paintball news items than most other info sites it looks like it's trying to compete with Warpig. (We're really not as old but we make up for that by looking old and tired.) Nor does the Bullet work well with IE 8 often blocking out parts of articles on linked pages. And it's probably just me but I like photos that are in focus.
One other site is worthy of a special mention and that site is X3, the online magazine portal. Not for its design--which is clean and quite decent--and not for its content--which is, um, inclusive (mostly) when it comes to paintball. Nope, X3 earns its special mention for the active counter of visitors currently online tucked away at the bottom right. I won't say the numbers are bogus but ...
The last word on this poll is lighten up. Okay, the last two words on this poll. Lighten up. You people are boring.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, never noticed the x3 "We have 752 guests and 1 member online" bit. That can't be right.

And I just searched PbN and there are painfully few links to VFDB at all and didn't see any telling people to go vote.

Baca Loco said...

Of course but PBN has dozens of drones supervising their little fiefdoms throughout the place. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ;-)

Reiner Schafer said...

Yeah, if X3 actually had that many people rummaging through their stuff at any given time, I'm sure there would be many more comments and such.

I mean VFTD probably has about 2.5 lurkers at any given time and has way more comments. ;-)

Anonymous said...

It all depends on how long you consider someone online. With the same traffic, if you can consider a guest "online" if they last looked at a page in the past 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, day.... and get wildly different results.