They are actively using them here, and I think it harms discussion for the reasons stated above. Every time I think “should I create a poll” the answer is “no”.
You want explanations and discussions and explorations… not context-free snap judgments that hew to a very narrow set of inflexible, predefined options.
For entertainment they might be OK, but that’s about it. As a useful tool for decision making or meaningful discussion … basically, useless.
So, what’s the main use-case for polls in forums? For me it’s the ability to provide a list of options and to easily see the poll result without manually counting the votes.
In my opinion polls are a very important part of discussions, if they are implemented the right way.
That’s not the case in Discourse (and I don’t know any other forum software that get’s it right either).
Currently many users click on the poll option and that’s it. There’s no way to know who chose what and why?
So, how can we make polls a part of the discussion? Votes should be public.
In order to cast your vote you’d need to post a reply. And such posts would include messages like:
Those messages would be auto-generated by the system and not be editable by the user.
Ideally there would be some kind of UI in the composer that allows the user to choose one (or even multiple) options from the available options. Since voting would be part of posting replies all the restrictions for minimal post length etc. would apply too.
Changing the poll options should always be allowed. It would be enough if such actions would generate a post like the staff messages when topics are closed. E.g. there would be posts like “Added Option 7 and Option 8”, “Removed Option 4”
Maybe we could even extend the filter functionality in order to show only posts that include a vote for certain options. Like it is currently possible to show only posts by a certain user inside a topic.
Yikes! Sure would ruin any voting processes or the likes where anonymity is desired.
Well, it could be optional. But I guess most of the time there’s no anonymity needed.
And please bear in mind that everyone with database access can see those votes anyway.
Discourse is a place for discussions. As others have already mentioned, the current state of polls doesn’t encourage discussions. Who wants to talk about his anonymous vote?
Who would need “anonymity” for things like this?
http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/poll-what-is-was-your-favourite-version-of-ubuntu/1854
Sure those don’t. But we rarely have such polls at our instance. Our mostly consist of “Should X become staff?”, where anonymity is desired so we get honest answers (though it doesn’t have to be… I guess)
Can’t get behind much of the discussion here, especially not a blanket ‘polls are useless’ argument.
It’s a no-brainer. If you want your forum users to use http://strawpoll.me/ or similar to create polls then fine. Disappointing, but okay.
If a poll plugin is supposed to be actually used then integrate it into the UI!
It might be easy enough to add a checkbox to the composer UI but space is a valuable commodity already so I don’t know how it could best be squeezed in.
IIRC, right or wrong, the Poll feature is considered to be a “power user” thing. i.e. not for the newbie, but discoverable to those that have learned a bit about how things work.
IMHO a Poll and discussion are not mutually exclusive. Have a Poll makes it easy to tally results without needing to count per post.
I agree with the restriction to alter options 100+% Changing the options after votes have been cast invalidates the poll making it useless.
That feels like something that shouldn’t be decided with a straight poll. Or, at least, not with the current polls that Discourse has today.
Ideally, something to do that would be something like:
What prevents the current Discourse polls from being used for that?
2^$CANDIDATES options (confusing users/“voters”) or $CANDIDATES topicsIt feels like those two use cases need different, but related, solutions.
unless you aim for someone to write a ‘top 10 hidden features of discourse’, it’s just bad UX in my opinion.
There is just no place to fix this in the composer, it would need a custom composer, but how would you even invoke that?
Polls are clearly an exception, forcing every user on the site to pick if the topic they are creating is a poll or not is very aggressive.
yea, I’d argue that the entire concept of polls requiring to be locked to one topic is flawed. Why not allow polls anywhere in a reply?
How would anyone find them? If a poll is reply 45 of 362, how does anyone get there or know about it? At least a topic titled Poll: is clear in its intent and purpose, and you know the poll is in the first post.
People discuss. Some arguments are made. Someone calls for vote. Bang, poll.
My point is that a poll can aid a discussion; it doesn’t have to be the sole focus from the start.