Poll with ability for user to add their own options

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?

5 Likes

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.

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.

7 Likes

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

6 Likes

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.

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.

7 Likes

On that topic this is an “automation” type workflow @joffreyjaffeux 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.

4 Likes

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:

2 Likes

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

0 voters

1 Like

Closed in favour of Let users add more poll options while the poll is running