Even if the list isn't public, I'm sure it exists. I don't know the limitations of their forum and administrators, but if they are able to view who votes, they will. They'll share it in private groups and use it as justification for future bans and gatekeeping inner circles.
Yup! There's no chance their forum software doesn't record who voted for what on each poll. It already has to record that a user voted on a specific poll to prevent users from voting multiple times. Might as well just add the actual vote as a column too. You
can design a forum poll system that prevents double-voting, keeps accurate vote counts and ensures actual votes can't be traced back to the user who cast them (rather like a real election system), but it's easier to just slap each vote in a "votes" table with the user, poll and choice than it would be to split it all out to anonymize it.
The funny thing about it is that the "easy" method is (to no one's surprise) the slowest, and the most common way to solve that specific problem is to periodically scan the votes table to update the counts in a "tally table" that's much smaller and faster ... which is one step removed from just doing it right to begin with.
Can you really even tell the most obsessed Twitter users from bots? They all basically parrot the same things anyway.
Yeah, it's generally not that hard. Twitter bots aren't even remotely sophisticated (because they don't need to be; the target audience is composed entirely of fucking idiots), so they just watch/search for key words or phrases to trigger a specific response. That response is identical every time it's posted. It's why you'll often see the same exact post made sometimes thousands of times by just as many different users -- they're all bot accounts. Every one of them. Often they're all managed (by the thousands) by a single instance of a piece of software running on a low-rent server somewhere. It's lightweight, fast, cheap and easy.
You can literally catch bot accounts by the thousands just watching the Twitter "firehose" API for an hour, hashing the text content of every message (cleaned up first -- strip out mentions, punctuation and whitespace, lowercase the string, etc.), and counting how many times you see each hash. If you see a hash more than 20-30 times, it's no longer coincidence. Typically if you're going to see a hash repeated at all, you're going to see it hundreds or thousands of times. Every account that posted it is a bot.
Real live idiots will parrot the same talking points almost verbatim, but spacing, word choice, phrasing surrounding the "meat" of the talking point, etc. will vary a little bit. Bots may vary what they say from time to time (or even from post to post), but every time they say something, they say it on tons of accounts all at once.
Naturally Twitter does nothing to stop this despite detection being trivial. An idiot like me can spot them using the technique I've described here. Twitter's got access to all sorts of data I don't -- things like browser fingerprints, IP logs, precise API call timing, API key usage rates, etc. They could
easily stop all of it. They just don't want to. They know it'd cut traffic down to almost nothing instantly and they're only afloat on the faith of their investors in the user counts and traffic Twitter shows them every quarter.
Source: worked for a market research company, took over development on a twitter firehose ingest tool from a former (fired) developer, noticed tons of repetition, started digging, discovered all sorts of things (including the above), saved employer 6 figures per year by proving Twitter is utterly worthless for market research and justifying not paying Twitter for firehose access anymore.