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With Think Tasty being almost three years old, I’ve become quite comfortable with sharing recipes, writing restaurant reviews, and conducting chef interviews. To keep things interesting, it seemed like the perfect time to add a new feature to the site: finding the best restaurants in America. I decided that introducing ten or twelve great restaurants per region would be assist our readers in finding new dining adventures. Adding a poll to determine which is the best would be beneficial to the restaurants themselves, as I would be writing a more in-depth review of the winner each region.
Starting with the Pacific Alaska region, I was pleased with the recommendations that I received and chose the ten that would appear in the article. Article written and poll created, I published the post. About a day after publication, I received an email from a reader. He was disappointed because his colleagues couldn’t vote, as I had set the poll not to allow votes from the same IP address. It seemed unfair to me that his colleagues wouldn’t be able to vote, so I allowed votes to come from the same IP address. For a week, all was good.
With two days left in voting, I was thrilled to see an increase in voting. I assumed people were excited for their favorite restaurants to win. However, checking the voting logs, it showed a different story. When the same IP address submits 60 votes in 2 minutes, you know that it merely is someone trying to flood the system. With this knowledge, we returned the settings not to allow votes from the same IP address and removed all fraudulent votes. It also was a valuable lesson for me: good intent does not always produce good results.
However, after correcting those wrongs, we now can reveal who the true winner of this contest is. . .
Terrace Kitchen in Lake Oswego, Oregon
Please return to Think Tasty in the coming weeks to learn more about this restaurant and why it is the best restaurant in the Pacific Alaska region.
To learn how the nine other restaurants fared, click here.
