nathank
June 9, 2020, 11:26pm
8
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:
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.
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.2020-02-24T08:00:00Z 2020-02-25T12:00:00Z 2020-02-26T16:00:00Z
Select the text of all the options in your list and Copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C, or right-click and select Copy)
Create a Poll using the ‘Build Poll’ option, again from the Discourse composer toolbar, this time you need to access the dropdown from the
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
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!
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