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Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

ricksantorum.com

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Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#21

This is used to decide what dollar amount to display on the donation meter on this page: https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/ You can infer from the Javascript, but it just displays a dollar amount equal to the number of seconds elapsed since a certain time (edit: whoops, see below), according to your computer clock. If you refresh every second it will go up by $1 each time. If you set your clock back a year,…

Mark-to-market accounting, or window-dressing as the accountants refer to it.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#22
post #18
post #6

I find it most disturbing that they are polluting the global namespace with all those variables and functions. Don't JavaScript developers these days understand how to properly scope their JavaScript?

I find the 8 space indentation most disturbing.

It's the Tab character.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#24
post #19

wait, did anybody actually think those donation counters were real ?

Honestly in other cases they are. I had personal experience developing tools used for Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign (as a volunteer not staff) and in that case it was certainly real.

I'd be very, very surprised if the ones used by Ron Paul and Obama weren't real. They have good engineering talent there, and (in the case of Obama at least) good political talent. This runs contrary to both.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#25
post #6

I find it most disturbing that they are polluting the global namespace with all those variables and functions. Don't JavaScript developers these days understand how to properly scope their JavaScript?

I like that bad namespacing is what you find disturbing here.

I can't help it. It's just the way I'm wired.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#27
I don't think there's anything wrong, in principle, with this approach, so long as the simulated rate is calibrated frequently to the actual average donation rate.

Having it all wired up properly would require a whole lot of infrastructure, particularly for donation mechanisms that aren't online and aren't all tied in to a single system.

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