New in Discourse 3.2.0.beta4: polls default to public

[david (David Taylor)]

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.

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.

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

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.

[david (David Taylor)]

I see, yup. We can certainly make this configurable

FEATURE: Configure poll 'public' default via site setting

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

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

[alefattorini (Alessio Fattorini)]

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