The amazing, invisible That's Beijing Bar Awards

I have just spent 10 or 15 minutes looking around That's Beijing's utterly dire and damn nigh unnavigable website, and have entirely failed to find a link for the online voting form for this year's Bar & Club awards.

If you do follow this link to the form, you won't find any information on how long the poll is open - but I fear it is not very much longer. Perhaps the end of this week??

And I wouldn't have any great confidence that your vote is actually going to be counted. I tried to vote last week, but never received the promised e-mail confirmation (which has to be replied to, before your vote will be counted). So, it looks like a bit of a SNAFU all around.

There aren't really too many categories of any interest to me. They seem to have abandoned the 'Best Barman' award (as being too contentious??), which leaves the 'Hidden Gems' as the only real area for enjoyable debate...... although, of course, we'd rather our hidden gems remained hidden, thank you very much. We don't want the hoipolloi descending on Reef and Whatever and..... whatever......

However, do please go and try to uphold the principles of free democracy by voting for something. And, if you can't, bombard That's with complaining e-mails!

Of course, my own Bar Awards are far more entertaining and insightful (at least for me) because only I get to vote in them! Democracy is perhaps an over-rated concept.

Update: Closing date for voting is supposed to be Monday 10th June (it's right at the very end of Page 6 of the online voting form, rather than at the beginning - or anywhere on the That's website!). Since that is a holiday in China, in practice the closing date was probably Friday 7th June.

I still haven't got any of the promised (necessary) e-mail confirmations that my online votes went through OK, so I have to figure they didn't (none of the THREE attempts).

The link from the magazine's website to the (apparently non-functioning) online polling site was, I belatedly discovered, "hidden" in a banner at the very top of the page (where one tends not to look), which changed appearance so quickly that it was easy to miss the fleeting reference to 'Bar & Club Awards' (this line was on screen for less than a third of the time that the irritatingly animated 'Click here to vote' was! "Vote on WHAT? I didn't catch that!"). I had ignored it altogether on several visits to the site over the past couple of weeks. There was no link in the article (which, bizarrely, I found - only via a Google search - on the old website, www.thatsbj.com, which I understood to have been completely discontinued long since; it's not possible to navigate from this article to any other page on that site, so it might be the only page still active....) about the awards - no link at all. Crazy.

Who is designing the website for these guys? It's just AWFUL!!! AWFUL!!!!!!!

And did anyone see a ballot form in this month's or last month's edition of the magazine? Nope, me neither - and I did try several copies.

I've always suspected that these 'awards' are decided by the editorial staff over a few drinks (and, indeed, very probably decided by which bar owner offers them more free drinks); but this year there is simply no alternative. It has been, it would seem, just about impossible for anyone to cast any genuine votes, so.......