User: Mister Poll

Sure! Keep away from that "Back" button and just click the "Home" link in the sidebar after posting your message. That will take you back to the home page where the directory lives.

========== In Reply To ========== Lately, when I make a comment post after answering a poll and try to back out and go back to the directory, my comment post is double posted.
Can I do something differently to stop this from wasting computer space.

And now the blue background/ pictures have left me leaving an incomplete white background.

Sorry, our image server was having a nervous breakdown for some reason. It's feeling much better now, and all of the images are back.

Did you get a message telling you that your poll had been added to the directory? It's possible that either it hasn't been reviewed or it wasn't put in the directory. Try searching 'All Polls' instead of just 'Public'. It may turn up as a limited interest poll, which means it isn't in the directory but can be found by a broad search.

========== In Reply To ========== When I do a search, I cannot find my own polls!! I have already selected "public" as well as a category for my polls. Can somebody tell me what's wrong?

Hi Richard,

That's a good suggestion. I'll discuss it with our directory diva and see what she thinks.

Mister Poll

========== In Reply To ========== .. dividing the miscellaneous category into two. You could call them Miscellaneous Serious and Miscellaneous Just For Fun.

Hi Shari,

Sorry for the delay in responding. For some reason I haven't wandered into this message are for several weeks.

The only thing I can think of that would make our site inaccessible to you is our new poll spammer trap. Not that you personally are spamming polls, but you may be caught in the wake of somebody else's abuse. Here's how it works.

Far too many losers were spamming polls by voting in them hundreds, if not thousands, of consecutive times. This would put such a drain on our servers that they would crash from time to time. Now, if somebody votes excessively, their IP is completely banned from our server. To them, it appears as if the server no longer exists.

The problem is that sometimes one of these users is coming through a popular ISP such as AOL, WebTV, or Earthlink. If one of their main proxies is banned, it can affect more than just the one poll spammer.

Because of this, we wipe our ban list and start over on a daily basis. However, you still may be indirectly banned for up to 24 hours.

If you want to find out if this is what's happening to you, email me at misterpoll@misterpoll.com next time you can't reach the site. Tell me what ISP you are going through at the time, and I'll see if any of their major IP addresses are currently banned.

========== In Reply To ========== Howdy. I just wondered what, if anything, is wrong with the Misterpoll site or servers or whatnot. The reason I ask is because over the past 2 weeks or so, I cannot access the site most of the times I try.

Either my browser just tries and tries for a long time until I get a "time out" message, or my browser tries and tries and then gives me a message saying that it could not find any site named "www.misterpoll.com"

What keeps causing your site to go down for extended periods of the day and/or night? It's getting pretty frustrating. Also, just for the record, I have had the same problem with both DSL (at work) and dial-up (at home) connections, and with both Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. So you can see why I am thoroughly confused!

Thanks for your help, Shari :)