Cheats have tried to rig an online poll in the Wokingham Times on an issue that has divided the community.

One saboteur voted 664 times in an attempt to skew the result of an opinion poll on a new stand for supporters at the Wokingham and Emmbrook FC ground, Cantley Park.

Yet there was a similar rigging attempt from the other side, with individual computers logging 80, 56 and 23 votes.

Readers had changed the settings on their machines to allow multiple entries.

Editor Adam Smith said: “Both sides are a little embarrassed by all this and have gone to ground after our front page splash on the story.

”It’s amazing that a story like this can generate such strong feeling.

“It’s also good that people value our polls that much – to make a concerted attempt at cheating.”

The Times broke the story about plans for a 250-seat stand some three months ago and has been keeping it running to reflect the massive feelings from both sides among readers.

The paper ran an earlier poll that seemed to be straightforward and decided to run another one to show how campaigning and coverage had affected people’s views.

Adam said: “The football club chairman called to say the results could’t be right because he had rallied all his members to vote.

“So we got our techies to take a closer look and the results led to our splash ‘Cheats try to rig our Cantley park web poll’.

“We traced 664 votes to one machine registered to a UK company.”

A further 80 had come from an NTL user, 56 from a Telewest subscriber and 23 from a Tiscali customer.

The results of the second poll have not been published but Adam said that the large number of false votes would have tipped the result against the £250,000 development.

Denials have been printed from active campaigners on both sides.