I know one of the early ones was the never-ending Beatles survivor that I ran in B&C that took nearly a year and a half to get done in 06/07, but I don't think that was the first. Just for perspective though, the participation in that Beatles survivor was like double the participation in this survivor, and I've been pleasantly surprised at the participation in this survivor(averaging like 20 people per poll).
There was a HTDAAB-era album and song survivor here, in which HTDAAB experienced a huge new-album bounce and came in the top four. My memory's now getting fuzzy; I don't think I ran the album part but I did at least some of the song tournament.
The one with the best participation - and the one that birthed Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Superthread - is the one I ran in 2007-08. I ran it quite deliberately at that time, as a new album was still months away but excitement over HTDAAB had calmed down, so we got results more reflective of long-term opinion.
But before any of these was one very early in my time on Interference where we voted by PM! That was to avoid influencing the vote in any way. It was the first, but the need for PMs made it onerous to run and drove down participation.
Anyway, I'm just not really sure what the point of another 'Best U2 Song' survivor would be. I mean, Streets, One, Bad, and some combination of UTEOTW/The Fly/WOWY will be the final few. Everyone knows it.
Oh this is very true. But we could at least integrate Songs of Innocence and see how NLOTH has fared in Interference's estimation.
Once the band start touring again we may even get better rates of participation.