The discussion revolves around restricting poll creation to specific Trust Levels in Discourse. BenLeong asks if polls can be limited to Trust Level 4+ for staff while allowing all users to vote. Currently, the admin settings only allow enabling/disabling polls globally, with no trust-level restriction. codinghorror suggests this could be feasible, and tgxworld confirms that while server-side implementation is possible, the current plugin system’s ‘disabled’ state prevents manual poll creation by staff when polls are globally disabled. eviltrout clarifies that the plugin’s ‘disabled’ state is handled via enabled_site_setting, and using it would make future changes more reliable. Slowhand supports restrictions due to misuse by younger users, while Mittineague suggests flagging or unlisting posts instead. tgxworld proposes adding a new site setting to allow staff-only poll creation, which would avoid confusion and align with how PMs work. codinghorror suggests integrating this into a broader ‘safe mode’ for plugins in Discourse 1.7.
Is there currently a way of restricting poll creation to specific Trust Levels? For example, allowing Trust Level 4+ to create polls, and Trust Level 0+ to vote in them?
We have polls disabled as we don’t want poll creation to be available to all users. However, we would like Staff to be able to create them for the community to vote on.
Admin settings currently only provide two options: “Poll enabled” (yes/no checkbox) and a field for the maximum number of options allowed in a poll. Is there another way of setting this up?
I believe that was the case in an older (pre-Discourse) version of the forum, and it rapidly got out of hand… User-created polls dominated the more popular discussion categories, and some forum members felt that getting a majority vote on a poll option should immediately translate into the business allocating resources to that course of action.
Lots of pairs of eyes are fantastic at identifying problems, but not necessarily great at deciding how problems should be fixed - particularly if there are a lot of factors (technical or process) involved behind the scenes. Almost all of our community issues are things that we’re happy to get feedback on from the community, but we don’t want decision making via mob rule to be the default
Maybe adding the voting plugin will be a less politicized way of having people express themselves? I’m suggesting this as a way people might be inclined to make less polls.
Again, these are teenagers, they don’t worry about silly things like Flags. And if their account is banned, they create another. Or enlist their friends to do so - it’s just endless.
But, I’m finished with this now. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen and I need to get over it and move on.
I suggest disabling polls altogether. Remember staff are immune to those kinds of disables anyway.
Can we confirm that the setting works this way @tgxworld? If staff manually enter a poll in a post, even with polls “disabled”, I think it should work. Sort of the same way that PMs being “disabled” works.
@eviltrout raised that this might be a little confusing as polls “disabled” should result in polls being totally unavailable on the instance. If we’re going to add a site setting like “Only Staff can create polls”, I think it won’t take much work to make it such that we can restrict polls to certain trust levels.
No, this is also how PMs work. Disable PMs and you disable them for users,
but staff can still send messages. There is no way to turn messages all the
way off. Polls can be the same way.
