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More users start forms than finish them Imagine if the opposite happened!
by EdiX 10y ago
More users start forms than finish them
Imagine if the opposite happened!
- curiouslurker 10y agoIt does happen. I am from a third world country and one year my friend worked on the databases for counting election results. In certain regions where the ruling party rigged the elections, there were more votes (for preferred candidates) than registered voters! The internal database checks would not allow this and the minister in charge of elections called him in the middle of the night to complain that the system was not working :)
- nathancahill 10y agoWhich county? Same thing happened in Guatemala where I'm from.
- curiouslurker 10y agocan't say unfortunately!
- coldtea 10y agoWhat's so special about the opposite? It can easily be achieved. 10 users start 10 forms each, but leave them incomplete. 100 other users then finish one each of those forms. So you have 10 users starting 100 forms and 100 users finishing said 100 forms, thus "more users finishing forms than users starting them".
- mwfunk 10y agoWell, call me crazy, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and postulate that in the context of this discussion, the people finishing the forms are presumed to be the same people who started them. You could probably also find loopholes if you take into account things like time travel paradoxes but I'm not sure if it really adds anything. :)
- coldtea 10y agoYeah, mostly tongue in cheek response.
- kbenson 10y agoI think your assumption of what a form is, and the implied behavior it exhibits, is different than mine. How do multiple people pick up a single abandoned form and complete it? Edit: Oh, nevermind. I read your example more closely. I guess, the question is in a digital context, how are different users completing forms than the ones starting them. Unless you are just making a point about how it's theoretically possible, even if more likely in an analog context.
- coldtea 10y ago>I guess, the question is in a digital context, how are different users completing forms than the ones starting them. Unless you are just making a point about how it's theoretically possible, even if more likely in an analog context. Well, it was more of a tongue-in-cheek reply -- I tried to hack through the seeming "impossibility" the parent mentioned. That said, I can see several ways to achieve that in a digital context: a) the users can be in the same physical space. So one starts 10 forms etc, and then ten others sit on his computer and finish them. b) we could build a fancy networked way to share forms ("collaborative form completion"), or just use something like remote access / VNC etc to be able to keep the users each in their own space. c) or merely share accounts. A user logs in as X1 to X10 and starts 10 forms, then 10 users login in the same accounts with the same shared credentials and finish them.
- kbenson 10y agoI like c), I think that neatly satisfies the preconditions that I think would most likely be present and cause problems with a) and b). It wouldn't necessarily work on multi-page forms that store data in the session, but that still leaves quite a few systems where it's possible, and not really hard to accomplish. :)