Poll with ability for user to add their own options

[Robin_Fisher]

Hi guys,

We use Discourse over at zenAud.io community and I really want to make a poll that allows users to add their own option to vote for like Facebook does:

Could this be an option for a future update?

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

Seems like a Good idea but how are we supposed to handle trolls? what if someone just ads random option that is irrelevant to discussion and everyone else just starts trolling by selecting that?

Or maybe everyone ads their own opinion and votes for it! No clear majority.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

My recommendation:

1. Create a topic soliciting vote-able “items” for a future poll

2. Gather feedback in the topic replies for a period of time

3. After gathering feedback, then create the poll using the most popular items (you can count likes on the posts to determine this)

Allowing anyone to add a new option to a poll at any time is a recipe for chaos.

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

Another approach to this that may work for you would be the existing voting plugin:

Discourse Topic Voting

Summary Discourse Topic Voting lets community members vote on topics in designated categories. Install Guide This plugin is bundled with Discourse core. There is no need to install the plugin separately. While Discourse Topic Voting can be used for a variety of use cases, this documentation is focused on the primary use case of an ideas or feature request category. Note: Discourse Topic Voting is available on the Business or Enterprise …

[loginerror (Maciej Kuźmicz)]

@codinghorror

Allowing anyone to add a new option to a poll at any time is a recipe for chaos.

I was just looking for similar functionality that would facilitate finding the best time to have a meeting (Doodle-like functionality, except in this case users could suggest the time that fits them).

It could still work for closed groups where you have a smaller subset of users with less likelihood of it being abused.

[riking (Kane York)]

You still have a giant result bias towards options added earlier, except in rare cases of massively compelling new options.

The best way to handle this is to have a discussion about what options should be available before you start the poll.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@loginerror

I was just looking for similar functionality that would facilitate finding the best time to have a meeting

On that topic this is an “automation” type workflow @j.jaffeux and I have been thinking about.

Instead of a poll, you have users post a list of dates they can or can not make, and the the OP can help find the ideal timeframe for the event based on the replies, dynamically.

We are also investigating adding more event support to our discourse calendar plugin so we may consider this.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@sam

Instead of a poll, you have users post a list of dates they can or can not make, and the the OP can help find the ideal timeframe for the event based on the replies, dynamically.

We’ve got a botched together way of doing this, which works quite well. The only issue is that there is a not insignificant admin burden to set one up, and this might benefit from your workflow wizardry. I thought it up, and @pacharanero has documented it:

@pacharanero

Doodle-esque polls in Discourse

You can use tools entirely within Discourse to create a ‘Doodle’-like poll which automatically shows users the dates and times in their local timezone. This is brilliant for arranging video (or physical) meetings.

So now there’s no need to use an external service when trying to determine the best time for a meeting, or to die by 100 emails. It takes a bit of finesse, but isn’t too hard for those used to Discourse.

How to do it:

1. Create a post or a private message for the poll to go in. Whether you use a post or a private message will depend on whether this is an open meeting or one where you want to specifically invite certain individuals.

2. Using the ‘Insert date/time’ tool in the Discourse composer toolbar, create the date/time options you will put into the Poll. Initially these options can just be put into the post text in the composer, you will copy and paste them into the Poll later.
   
   For example, here are some dates created in this way. Note that if you hover the mouse over them it shows you the date/time in a selection of timezones (you can configure which timezones are shown using the Advanced button in the date/time tool dialog box). Another neat thing is that you can directly edit the data in the date/time, copy and paste them, etc which makes it very quick to create multiple date/times.
   The text that is automatically created in the Composer looks like this:
   
   But it will be shown on the right hand side in its fully rendered form like this, and this is what users will see in the Poll.
   2020-02-24T08:00:00Z
   2020-02-25T12:00:00Z
   2020-02-26T16:00:00Z

3. Select the text of all the options in your list and Copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C, or right-click and select Copy)

4. Create a Poll using the ‘Build Poll’ option, again from the Discourse composer toolbar, this time you need to access the dropdown from the menu:
   

   

• Choose ‘Multiple Choice’ or ‘Single Choice’ according to whether you want users to be able to choose several available options, or only one preferred option.

• I would suggest to also select Results ‘Always Visible’ so that people can see what other people have chosen (unless you don’t want them to).

• You can also tick ‘Show who voted’ which would seem sensible for a poll on meeting times, but maybe there are times you don’t want that.

• And of course you can choose to ‘close the Poll automatically’ at a given time so that people have to respond by a deadline in order to vote. (you need to scroll down slightly below ‘Show who voted’ to see that checkbox)

• Paste the copied text into the large text box ‘Enter one poll option per line’
  01aec341650b666ee69dcaa2864c54ad9a3c1655|316x250
  (Incidentally you can create a poll on anything, not just dates/times - there are lots of other features in the Polls tool, so feel free to experiment, maybe by sending Private Messages to yourself or colleagues.)

1. Here is the markdown of the finished poll

[poll type=multiple results=always min=1 max=3 public=true chart Type=bar]
* [date=2020-02-24 time=08:00:00 timezone="Europe/London"]
* [date=2020-02-25 time=12:00:00 timezone="Europe/London"]
* [date=2020-02-26 time=16:00:00 timezone="Europe/London"]
[/poll]

One of the neat advantages of this over Doodle is that people can still reply in text form under the poll, which can be helpful if there are other parameters to consider such as location, videoconferencing needs, AV arrangements etc. And of course the record of the decision is right here in your Discourse instance rather than being scattered around the web on other people’s computers!

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

This is the actual poll (it couldn’t be done inside a quote):

• 2020-02-24T08:00:00Z
• 2020-02-25T12:00:00Z
• 2020-02-26T16:00:00Z