Mitchs best woodie poll

Next year it will not be as time consuming as you will have most of it done.

Yes. I see that now.

SFoGswim said:
Coaster Fanatics has a really great web app which helps organize and create your ballot.

Here is the link for it!

http://www.coasterfanatics.com/sec_poll/poll_step1.asp?type=2009wood

I've used the coasterfanatic helper the past few years (I didn't vote at all last year), and I think it's really easy. Of course, that's the advantage of riding the same coasters over and over, I only have 21 rows to worry about. :) But the helper automatically leaves the rows blank that need to be, so you can't screw up the formatting that a lot of people have a problem with.

Thanks for the link. Still took a bit to sort through the 57 woodies from this year.

How in the heck can everyone afford $150 for Excel?

I really got a kick out of your post above, matt. Now I would like to say...

The only list I care about is my own. ;)

Open Office is free.

I got mine for free when I was in school. Just another benefit of going to college.

Pagoda Gift Shop said:
Allow me to be the one to complain about how ugly the website is, and how voting by email using text files is so 1996.

In this case, you're the one who is out of line. Remember that The Poll was created (and ballots originally distributed) via rec.roller-coaster, which is the *original* Internet roller coaster discussion forum. r.r-c is a plain text medium (enforced, in fact, by a number of key USENET sites that actually block as spam and automatically kill any messages containing rich text or HTML) and the target audience is a group of people for whom the World Wide Web is a nuisance.

Just go read the thread about the new train chassis recently delivered to Knoebels. Most of the posts are requests to have the photos reposted to someplace other than Facebook. Unfortunately, the official r.r-c FTP site seems not to work anymore...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Your inner retro-grouch is coming out, Dave. And I know you aren't using your Apple IIgs anymore. :)

I don't care where the poll came from or what its history is, because you really can't expect people in this day and age to be mucking around with text files. The Internet is not something that just nerds use anymore, and if the target audience is just nerds, then the poll doesn't realistically sample anything.

Of course, the concept of an annual poll, instead of real-time, is somewhat absurd in the Internet age as well.

I personally like the minimalism of the site, and now that I think about it, I think I actually like the poll specifically because only people who feel compelled enough to respond are the ones who self-select and do it.

It would be interesting, as Jeff suggests, to design something that updates in real time and is very easy to fill and rank, but then your sample gets really diluted by casual fans and more of that dreaded "GP" contingent. Which would be fine, it would be very interesting, but I think it would serve a very different purpose. Personally I consider myself to have pretty well developed...palate, for coasters, if you will, so I like that we have a poll which probably represents the sort of coaster rider I *am,* as opposed to what's closer to the larger population.

It's like one of those Republican presidential straw polls they have in Iowa. Only the hardline conservatives feel compelled to vote, so you don't get the best measure of what the party as a whole would vote for, but you do get an idea of what the fanatics like.

I see now that the ballots won't be available for viewing until after the poll closes. Excellent idea. Now we won't have the people getting stoked up because "their" coaster is behind, and have to go in and rank the front runners low to try to throw off the curve. It's pretty comical each year to see coasters like El Toro or Voyage ranked 132nd on somebody's list, behind the likes of Grizzly.

I think that would be a major issue with a real time poll that's constantly updated. And really, who beyond the real coaster geeks would be compelled to go in every 3 or 4 days to update their rankings because they rode a new coaster last weekend, or one they rode last year sucked this time?

The idea of doing it once a year is fine by me.

I don't normally rank, but I do love taking the poll. The problem is... Once I get past my "stand out" favorite rides, I really couldn't care less about the rest of them. Of course, I do like to put the rides I really don't like, at the bottom too. Some of those choices may make some people upset (for instance, I have Shivering Timbers somewhere in there with Mean Streak) but if you look at my top list of coasters, it's because my preference is for rides like Voyage and things that throw me around.

Besides, it's my list so :-P.

I'm just happy to know I'm not the only one who got the really substandard rides on Timbers (pretty sure Moosh got "meh" laps on it too). What makes the poll so hard for me is rating Timbers, or WWildcat. Haven't ridden either in 7 or 8 years, and WWildcat *was* near the very bottom of my list then (Timbers was middle-of-the-pack). Since that time, I've added probably five or six dozen wooden coasters to my record. I also understand WWildcat has since received a lot of work and rides MUCH better.

Ppoint being, I feel completely incapable of giving any meaningful ranking to either of those rides at this point...

Jeff said:
The Internet is not something that just nerds use anymore, and if the target audience is just nerds, then the poll doesn't realistically sample anything.

I know we have this conversation every year, but I still wholeheartedly disagree with that logic.

That means any poll has an unrealistic poll based on how the sample is taken (people who answer their phone, people who stop in the mall and agree to answer some questions, people who subscribe to a certain publication, and so on)

I think the effort needed concentrates the sampling to a very specific group - people who care enough about ranking coasters to go through the hassle of doing it the way Mitch does.

It's not a general sampling and I don't think it's meant to be. It's the rankings by hardcore geek enthusiasts for hardcore geek enthusiasts - and it does that very, very well.

rollergator said:
I'm just happy to know I'm not the only one who got the really substandard rides on Timbers (pretty sure Moosh got "meh" laps on it too). What makes the poll so hard for me is rating Timbers, or WWildcat. Haven't ridden either in 7 or 8 years, and WWildcat *was* near the very bottom of my list then (Timbers was middle-of-the-pack). Since that time, I've added probably five or six dozen wooden coasters to my record. I also understand WWildcat has since received a lot of work and rides MUCH better.

Ppoint being, I feel completely incapable of giving any meaningful ranking to either of those rides at this point...

I've been there twice and there is a huge difference between top running and NORMAL OPERATION.

Timbersfest or rain, Only time you'll get C.O.S.T type rides and ITS AWESOME!

Lord Gonchar said:

It's not a general sampling and I don't think it's meant to be. It's the rankings by hardcore geek enthusiasts for hardcore geek enthusiasts - and it does that very, very well.

I think the best thing to understand with all of this is regardless of how the sample is taken (and to me, the self-selecting hardcore nerd sampling doesn't bother me that much) there is no error built into the results.

Point being, the rankings that serve as an outcome are merely point estimates, unlike what you would normally desire in real survey research ie something with a confidence level.

In other words, like we say every year you have to take all of it with a grain of salt because the likelihood that the sample's preferences exactly mirror those of the real population is very small, but it gets us close. In a perfect world you could take the data and say "If I select one coaster enthusiast at random it is 95% likely they'll prefer Coaster X over Coaster Y" but reporting like that just isn't as compelling as just making a list.

So a list it is. Of course this is just preaching to the choir and we all understand how the poll works and how to read it. Nobody here thinks because one coaster ranks above another that it truly must be better, it's just a matter of the probability that someone would prefer it over another. The probability of a randomly picked enthusiast ranking lots of and lots of wooden coasters over El Toro isn't very high, but I still do it all the same.

I hope the sample doesn't too well approximate the GP's preferences. I can't help but be reminded of the toothless forty-year-old lady overheard this summer: "Vortex is better than Diamondsnake 'cause it goes upside down."

^LOL. LOL!!! We hereby bequeath the moniker for King's Island's hyper.....Diamondsnake!

matt. said:
In other words, like we say every year you have to take all of it with a grain of salt because the likelihood that the sample's preferences exactly mirror those of the real population is very small...

But I argue that it's not supposed to mirror the overall population's preference. I say it measures the trends of hardcore coaster nerds and that's the point.

It doesn't tell us what the best coasters are, it tells us which coasters hardcore enthusiasts like and dislike and puts them in a ranking order.

(which is kinda what you said)

Ensign Smith said:
I hope the sample doesn't too well approximate the GP's preferences. I can't help but be reminded of the toothless forty-year-old lady overheard this summer: "Vortex is better than Diamondsnake 'cause it goes upside down."

Probably pretty accurate for forty-year-old toothless women at Kings Island.

For the record, I'm sure she thinks your opinion is laughable too. ;)