Oh, the similarities are too great

So many of you know that I have no love lost for ratemyprofessors.com[*], but here's a story about a site that has a similar purpose: it's for British citizens to rate the responsiveness of their elected officials (writetothem.com). Well, apparently one of the "officials" decided to send a bunch of fake ratings - the site claims he was trying to unfairly manipulate his ratings. He claims he was just "testing" the statistics of the system. BBC NEWS | Politics | Site axes MP over 'fake' e-mails

[*]footnote: mainly I have issues with their security and their 1996-era technology, NOT whether or not it should exist, which I think it should, with the important caveat that it should be implemented properly, darnit!, which it's not...the security set up for who can/can't post is really lame. Basically I could write a program to automatically send positive (or negative) ratings to everyone on the system that I like. Hmmm, that might be a fun project. (I'm totally kidding. I am FAR too busy for this. Even if it is only about 100 lines of perl.) I'd almost rather see facebook be used for the purpose of rating profs. At least they ensure a .edu email address, and since it's a community where faculty are welcome, it would be more of a conversation and less of a "magic marker on a bathroom wall" type of thing. It's still not perfect, but it's something.