cchelius wrote:
Can you do the reverse with your tool - preset the initial votes for a poll? I'm just a marketing guy and rather than having a 3-question poll start out with 0, 0, and 0 votes (which looks quite lonely and uninteresting) I would like a new poll to start out with say, 999, 1001, and 1000 votes.
I actually delved into the database backend of my site's poll component (quite a dangerous thing for me to do) and I did not see any obvious data field to simply enter those numbers. It seemed to want me to increment another field one at a time. Great for real elections but not so handy for a simple marketing preference.
Faking a poll? Never trust a marketing guy
It's a bit offtopic for this thread, but hey, this could be fun. Anyway I would suggest not using Joomla!StatsCleaner for this, it is much easier to achieve with phpMyAdmin. Ok, here comes my little guide on how to fake a poll (actually its quite lengthy, but that's only because I really made it step-by-step to make it easy to follow in phpMyAdmin):
GUIDE ON HOW TO FAKE A POLLA poll's result consists of three different informations, which are located in three different database tables, jos_polls, jos_poll_data and jos_poll_date.
Using phpMyAdmin enter the database of your Joomla! installation. Now:
1.) "How often any poll option has been voted upon" (used for the graphical display of the poll's results)
In the list of tables on the left side click on "jos_poll_dat
a". At the top click on "Browse". You will now see the contents of the db table with each option of your poll as row. Click on the little pencil in the row of the first poll option you want to modify. Now you can modify the contents of that row. Change the value of the field "hits" to "999" or whatever you want. Next click on the "Go" button at the bottom. Repeat this step for all your poll's vote options.
2.) "How many people have voted" (displayed in "Number of Voters" below the poll's results)
In the list of tables on the left side click on "jos_polls". At the top click on "Browse". You will now see the contents of the db table containing one row for each poll you have set up on your site. Click on the little pencil in the row of the poll you want to modify. Now you can modify the contents of that row. Change the value of the field "voters" to something that makes sense, eg if you have three options with 999, 1000 and 1001 votes total it "voters" should be "3000". Next click on the "Go" button at the bottom. Repeat this step for all the polls you want to fake
3.) "The date and time of the first and the last vote" (also displayed below the poll's results)
In the list of tables on the left side click on "jos_poll_dat
e". Now two things could happen, please continue accordingly:
a) you can click on the button "Browse" at the top
b) you can't click on the button "Browse" at the top because it is greyed outa) If you can click on the button "Browse" at the top just click it and skip b) b) If the "Browse" button is greyed out and not clickable it means that there are now rows in this table and that means that you have never voted on any poll of that particular Joomla! install. If that should be the case it would be easier to continue if you open another browserwindow, go to the frontend of your site and vote once on any option of any poll. That way a row that we can modify will be created. After that go back to phpMyAdmin and again n the list of tables on the left side click on "jos_poll_dat[color=red]e". The button "Browse" will now be clickable. Click it. You will have only one row in this table, but we need two if we do not want the "First Vote" and "Last Vote" to display the same date and time. So we need to create a second row. To do that click on the "Insert" button at the top. Next click on "Go" and then again on "Browse" at the top. Now you will see that we have a second row that we may use for the date & time of the "Last Vote" display. Remember the value of "poll_id" of the first row, click on the little pencil of the second row and insert that value into the field "poll_id". Now click on the "Go" button.[/color]
You will now see the contents of the db table containing one row for each vote that has been made upon any option of any poll off your site. If you have several polls you can first click on "poll_id" at the top of the last column of this table. That way they will be sorted by poll. Now click on the little pencil in the
first row of the poll you want to modify. Now you can modify the contents of that row. Change the value of the field "date" to the date & time of when the first vote supposedly should have been made. Next click on the "Go" button at the bottom. Now click on the little pencil in the
last row of the poll you want to modify. Again change the value in the field "date" to the date & time of when the last vote supposedly should have been made.
That's it. You have successfully faked a Joomla! poll.
Hope this helps.
Nic
.
