Much better than the current bad joke that IW is making of the "Reader's Choice" awards, but still a few difficulties
Starting immediatly, require an email address from people signing up for both the print subscriptions and for forum access on IWE.
And since I own a domain name and can create new accounts, how hard would it be for me to create 1,000 new accounts and sign them up for IWE Forum access? You could probably write a script to do it quickly. IW is happy here: after all, I told them I made purchasing decisions for a 100,000 person company, and these are just the IS people working there. :^) IW would have to do some serious checking on the validity of new signups for the forums.
The only reason for complaints about the results would be either really serious apathy, or general lazyness.
Or the fact that they are still self-selected. The "OS/2 zealots" would still vote as a block- the windows folks might not care enough to bother to answer. Of course, you can have a valid argument that if folks won't for a product in a self-selected poll, it's not worthy of being called a "Reader's Choice."
Eric Remy
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