455190 - Poll results giving inconsistent results

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, task)

Description

[[:Cww]]

Right now, the way I'm pulling the data for the "Was this article helpful" polls on the KB articles is by using the http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-poll_results.php page, however I've discovered that the results that the page gives are very screwy.  For some polls, it shows you results for the week that you requested, and sometimes it shows you results alltime.  This of course completely breaks any ability to get metrics data from these polls.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

1) Load the following pages:

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-poll_results.php?vote_from_date=2008-09-08&vote_to_date=2008-09-14&maxRecords=300

(Poll results for THIS WEEK)

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-poll_results.php?vote_from_date=2008-09-01&vote_to_date=2008-09-07&maxRecords=300

(Poll results for LAST WEEK)

2) Compare results for an article like For Internet Explorer Users (994/1138 last week, 794/908 this week) to results for an article like How to disable the Smart Location Bar (2534/1981 this week AND last week).

3) Note that the How to disable article seems to showing poll results for ALL TIME and the For IE users seems to be showing it for the desired time frame.

4) Despair at getting reasonable metrics from this.

A couple other observations: 1) the ones that are limited seem to say Total: ###/#### votes whereas the ones which seem to be alltime say Total: #### votes.  2) The ones that are alltime are generally more recently created articles.

Comment 1

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Jason, can you confirm this erroneous behavior?

Comment 2

[Jason Barnabe (np)]

Yeah, there's something not right here. I'd guess that there's some problem with the initial data given to new polls. Old polls were likely "fixed" with a one-shot update.

Comment 3

[Nelson Ko [:nkoth]]

The old poll results may be not time limited because for some polls, where the pollConsiderationSpan was set at 0, we actually did not collect daily numbers, which makes it impossible then to get time limited results.

This behavior has now been changed with bug 452829 for newly collected data, and with the new tiki-poll_results.php to store daily poll numbers regardless of pollConsiderationSpan.

So if you use the new tiki-poll_results.php, it should NOT give you ALL TIME results anymore. However, for some old polls, since there was no daily data collected, there will be underrepresentation if your time period contains past periods (before the new behavior is pushed)

Comment 4

[[:Cww]]

Woot!  Just so I'm clear:  This change was pushed to the production server already right?  So as of next week, I can use poll_results to pull data for sunday-saturday?

Comment 5

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Woot!  Just so I'm clear:  This change was pushed to the production server
> already right?

0.7 is being pushed to prod tommorow.

Comment 6

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Cheng: Is this still a problem?

Comment 7

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

This is still a problem; and it makes it hard for us to get good poll data.

Comment 8

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

I just came across bug 398786. Was there anything done there, that might cause this?

Comment 9

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Where do we read poll data on master.support.mozilla.com?

Comment 10

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Where do we read poll data on master.support.mozilla.com?

Stats UI was not high-enough priority for 2.3, so we'll have to rely on SQL for stats for a little while. The benefit of that is we'll have a good sense of what stats are really valuable when we start building UI for it.