New in Discourse 3.2.0.beta4: polls default to public

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In Discourse 3.2.0.beta4, polls are now public by default — meaning voters’ identities are visible — to reduce user error and align with common platform standards. Previously, this setting was hidden under ‘advanced’ options and often left polls accidentally private, forcing users to reset votes when switching to public. The change applies only to new polls; existing ones remain unaffected. Administrators can revert to private-by-default via the ‘poll default public’ site setting, a feature added in response to user feedback Tris20 who needed anonymity for company policy compliance. david confirmed the configurability in a pull request, earning praise from Tris20 for the quick turnaround. Longtime users like alefattorini welcomed the fix, noting they’d repeatedly made the same mistake over the years. The change improves usability while preserving flexibility for admins.

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Discourse’s poll functionality has an option which allows users to see who else has voted. This could be activated by opening up the ‘advanced’ options in the poll creation dialog, and ticking the ‘show who voted’ button.

Over the years it’s been common for people to accidentally make private polls and then try to make them public later (thereby losing all existing votes). Public polls are a more common requirement, and are the standard on other platforms. Therefore, we’ve decided to make polls public by default.

Starting in the latest development version of Discourse 3.2.0.beta4, this option will be enabled by default. It will also be brought outside of the ‘advanced’ section of the dialog for more visibility.

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This change is only for new polls - existing polls will not be affected.

To change the default back to private, forum administrators can toggle the ‘poll default public’ site setting.

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Poll Defaults
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Is it going to be possible to change this default with a site setting? Unfortunately our company policy requires that polls must be anonymous for most cases, so being able to control what the default is would be a massive help for our use case.

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I see, yup. We can certainly make this configurable :+1:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/24348

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What a quick response, that’s massively impressive! Thanks for putting the effort into prioritising this :heart:

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After so many years I always made the same mistake :smiley: so thanks for changing the default

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