No Nick. It implies the guy thinks that people are more willing to participate in and provide honest responses to opinion polls on controversial topics when they believe they will remain anonymous. I happen to believe it's a good suggestion. I know that if I was pro-HD I wouldn't want to announce it to the whole forum. I won't vote if my vote isn't anonymous.
I don't know where you got the idea that his suggestion for improving the design of your poll implies what you said it did. Unless that scenario is what you actually fear and you want those pro-HD people to remain silent.
The poll is modelled on the Apollo Hoax poll, which was similarly structured and also public. There was a 290-1 result there. There was also an occasion for the poll, which was an appeal by an Apollo Hoax believer to 'the lurkers', which resulted in 248 lurkers saying that they disagreed with the Moon Hoaxer.
As the poll is essentially a binary yes/no choice, there can be only two honest responses, otherwise a pure fence-sitter will go the same way as the don't cares and not vote at all. Like the AH poll, I have asked whether people consider themselves to be active thread participants or not. Part I of GHDD thread saw 184 members post to it; excluding moderators there was something like a 9:1 ratio of people who visibly disagreed with denial. That is still accounting for a number of members who have since been banned, several being revisionists, some being antis, and some being obvious conspiracist trolls.
In both cases, one can certainly argue that a public poll might decrease the number of pro-Moon Hoax or pro-Holocaust revisionism members willing to state publicly that they believe in these things. Clearly, the public discussions of these subjects in the relevant threads show an overwhelming antipathy towards these beliefs on the part of the JREF membership.
In both cases, ascertaining whether there actually are any sooper sekrit Moon Hoaxers or revisionists would certainly require an anonymous poll. As I said, that can be tested later on.
But to have meaningful comparisons, firstly the HD poll must resemble the Moon Hoax poll
as closely as possible, and secondly any anonymous version must repeat the same wording/questions. This can be done at a later date, in say 3 months. Then and only then would one have meaningful results.
As I said, I see no evidence to suggest that there are genuinely any sooper sekrit revisionists who are JREF members, since the overwhelming majority of members seem to be totally disinterested in the subject. There are probably a number of conspiracy-minded members, known as advocates of other conspiracy theories or known as trolls, who might
perhaps vote 'yes' if offered a 57-choice poll, but I somewhat doubt that even when presented with an anonymous poll, more than a few would bother, since the conspiracy-minded members tend to be game-playing trolls and seem to much prefer starting their own troll threads to answering anyone's questions.
I also predicted that several members who have publicly expressed support for revisionism or revisionist ideas would not vote in the poll; evidently I was right. It seems a bit disingenuous to say that voting publicly if you have already posted 696 times in Part I of the GHDD thread and become known to presumably hundreds of people as a Holocaust denier is really that embarrassing. Since you are entirely 'outed', you have nothing whatsoever to lose by voting. Nor does Clayton Moore, or SnakeTongue, or several other members.
This would also help establish the baseline for an anonymous poll further down the line, since the most probable assumption is that a near-zero vote for 'don't participate and agree with revisionism' would increase... slightly, whereas the identities of those who post as pro-revisionists on the thread is already entirely public information.
One would presume that some of the 'out' revisionists wouldn't even vote honestly on an anonymous poll, out of some fit of pique or ego.
There is, of course, a take-a-dump-or-get-off-the-pot aspect to the yes/no choice, since I think everyone is well aware that there are a number of deniers who delight in fence-sitting and dancing around like fairies never saying anything clear-cut.
Another aspect of all this is ascertaining levels of interest. There hasn't been anything to prompt the poll per se, unlike the Moon Hoax poll, and there have been quite a few polls on other subjects recently, which may induce a bit of polling fatigue.
