Voting for CREG articles

Online voting (i..e likes and dislikes) for CREG articles was withdrawn on 23 June 2022. This was because too few people were using the facility for it to have any practical use. The CREG publications team might have a re-think and introduce a new version in the future. In the meantime, this page remains as it was, but obviously there are no longer any voting buttons to click. (Technical note to self: the on/off switch is in php function voting_buttons )

Click/Tap a link or scroll on down.

The voting scheme described here was released for "customer testing" on 1 June 2021. If it appears not to be working, a report would be appreciated.

Reader Survey

The CREG publication team would like to understand a little more about what type of article appeals to our readers. We thought that a questionnaire or survey would be difficult to interpret so, instead, we invite all readers to vote for the articles they like or dislike. If you navigate to one of the CREG journal contents lists you will see that there are voting buttons against each of the articles from about the last ten years (2011), plus a few articles from earlier journals. Most of the earlier journals are not split up into individual articles and so they do not have voting buttons shown. At the moment, our search engine does not include voting buttons for the listings it produces.

How to Vote

Click the up-vote button (▲) to add one to the accumulated score for the article, or click the down-vote button (▼) to subtract one from the accumulated score. Vote up if you like the article and/or would like to see more similar articles, Vote down if you do not like the article and/or would like to see fewer similar articles.

You can vote multiple times but the net effect of your voting will be limited to increasing or decreasing the score by one. In other words, after an up-vote, you can make two down-votes (the first down-vote cancels your up-vote and the second down-vote is your active vote). When you have voted, the appropriate button will be greyed out.

In order to keep a track of your voting, the web server stores your IP address. This means that if you are using a public web-browser (e.g. in a library or institution) your voting ability will be limited, because it will be shared with the other users. Thus, for your vote to count, please try to use a privately-owned computer. You can tell if voting has been capped for a particular article, for your IP address, because the up or down buttons will be greyed out.

The Small Print

The voting engine does not store any web cookies on your computer, but it stores your IP address in its online database. This is necessary in order to know whether you have already voted for an article. Web servers always store customer IP addresses in their logs anyway, so this is not something unusual. Your IP address does not identify you personally; it merely identifies the Internet node that you used to access our web site. However, in some circumstances, this could be enough to deduce your identity.

Development

Notes to self...

• Debug: The JS throttling routine is in JS:voting.js/function initialise(), and is set via e.g. var $throttle_rate = 10;
• How it works: PHP:format_CREG.php/voting_buttons($id) writes the voting buttons in <SPAN CLASS="votebuttons">. At the bottom of the index.html page JS:voting.js/function initialise() executes to initialise the buttons, which involves making an AJAX call for each one, to get the voting statistics from the listener at PHP:voting.php. The easiest way to disable voting is probably to alter voting.css to hide the buttons, and to set $throttle_rate to a low value.
• Debug: Show database as table
• Debug: Show database as array
• Debug: To show the counts, add showVotes=yes to the query string
• WORK-AROUND: JS throttle() is picking up the wrong values of j and L parameters. Fixed with a work-around. It must be something to do with variable scope, and needs investigating.
• TO DO: PHP voting_buttons() relies on $click_ref to generate a voting id, but this is only produced if there is a valid file to download. Consider altering this so that voting options apply to all articles with page number references, even if there is no PDF.
• TO DO: Need to copy the echo_autoVersion() procedure from index to search.
• TO DO: The voting buttons do not work correctly with the search engine, so they are currently disabled there. This is because of the way the voting ids are created, and the problem caused by a) having more than one article on a single page of the journal, or b) having a run of articles without page numbers (for the earlier journals). With individual journal listings, we know that all articles will be displayed so we just need to say "is the base-value of this voting id the same as the last one? If so, add a suffix letter." That doesnt work in the search engine because not all the article references are generated. When the articles are scanned by the filter, we need to generate a voting id, whether we use it or not. The complication might just be the intricate nature of the required coding, but further work is needed to investigate this.
• FIXED: Something is adding blank lines before the DOCTYPE. Possibly the despatcher? No; it was format_creg.php, which had blank lines after trailing closing tag.