The IEM homepage features the "IEM Daily Feature", which attempts to highlight something interesting and relevant to current weather and climate. Users are given the option to anonymously vote good, bad, or abstain to the most recent feature! A simple HTTP cookie is set to prevent voting more than once (yes this can easily be defeated for some motivated user...).

Anyway, I sometimes get questions as to why there are so many bad and abstain votes each day. Outside of people actually voting that way, there were likely two other reasons that accounted for most of those votes:

• Website search engine crawlers would follow the link and register votes
• Users would mistakenly bookmark the homepage that had the voting indication hard coded into the web address

So I have modified the voting code and am using javascript and a background HTTP call to do the voting. This should mostly stop the votes that are coming from the issues listed above.