As many of you probably remember, for the 2004 Poll I introduced a new online polling format, with a lot of help from Haq. Unfortunately, my meager skills are unable to reproduce something similar this year, and Haq does not have the time to assist me. Does anyone have the knowledge to help me build an online form, similar to last year's, for the poll. Haq mentioned that g and Max may be good candidates. If you would like to volunteer, please let me know.

Also, I'll need some non-technical help in creating a list of 2005 albums for the ballot. z helped a lot with this last year. It'd be nice if he or someone else could this year.

This is all part of my plan to make myself obsolete by 2008.

Thanks!

id like to help, but i have only a rudimenary knowledge of html, and know nothing of javascript, php, etc which i would imagine are important. sorry!

How about a thread where we list out a bunch of 2005 releases and debate anything questionable? The first post in the thread could be a list which would be updated with confirmed '05 releases.

It should be pretty easy -- just plagiarize last years forms, and substitute in the names of this years' albums.

I'd be happy to help, except work just got real busy for me. Anyway, I'll see if I can find last years' forms, and see what I can do.

i'd be happy to do the same as i did last year. let me when and what.

can't we just use something like the Obner "Charts", but have a 2005 section?

Something like the metacritic index and searching on 2005 may be a bit more thorough and accurate.

Charts is different though, isn't it. You rate albums 1-10, whereas on the shmoo poll you rank them.

On Charts, Timmy may think that nothing this year was higher than a 7, but Sketch may think there were three 10s. The Sketches of the world ultimately dominate the rankings.

In the Shmoo Poll, no matter how good/bad Timmy thought that album was, it was still his #1 for the year, and everybody is equal.

I was thinking the same thing - I'm sure Haq still has the form from last year. I'll help however you need me!

Okay, I tried to go to www.obner.org/poll, and it's gone.

Not that it would've helped -- I think I need the source, rather than the resultant html pages, so Haq, if you're reading -- could you please email me whatever pages shmoo wants me to work on? I could then email them back to someone who could then install and test them, that way I could help without having to be given admin privileges. I'm pretty good at working blind, there won't be a lot of errors.

I presume there's one file that's going to have all the albums in it, I don't know how that could possibly be divied up, so I'll just volunteer to do that one -- shouldn't be too much work, the rest would probably be the same.

Thanks for your offers of help!

What I did last year is send Haq a big txt file with the list.

Also, Haq said he's willing to give admin privileges for this.

I agree on all points, though the Sketches would feel guilty for dominating the rankings. I thought timmy meant using the charts as a source for the album list.

We are now, in fact, using the charts as a source for the album list. I found a couple of minutes to make a new poll. It's not as high tech as it could be, but it gets the job done.