Sorry for bumping an old topic, but I feel this still needs attention. What business is it of the developers to limit what the admin of a forum can do with their own polls? Why do you even care if it ‘invalidates the data’ of a poll? That should be for the person who created the poll to decide. Seems like there’s some unnecessary imposition of certain ideals going around here.
On our forum, we have a poll for “Which is your favourite game” of a particular series of video games. But by the nature of our forum, we like to make sure no topic gets left behind. We want this poll to remain relevant into the future of the series. For example, a new game has just come out in this series, and we want it to be added to the poll. But neither the original poster nor the admins themselves can do so without creating a new topic and resetting all the votes. No, I don’t want to reset the votes; I’d much rather ask the community to reconsider their vote and change it to the new game if they feel strongly enough for it.
How is this fair for us? Why should we be restricted because some developer decided “That’s wrong!”. As users of the software, we’re not children that need to be told how to play - we should be trusted with the power to decide how to organise our own community. This kind of restriction is not only unnecessary, but kind of insulting. At least give us the option to decide for ourselves.
Bumping this topic yet again, since I was unnecessarily stymied by the arbitrary five minute restriction on edits.
I created a poll to help our community make a choice, giving people a “None of the above (comment below)” option to allow people to suggest alternatives. The next day, people commented with some additional alternatives and I would like to add them to the poll… but I’m not allowed. Preventing editing of a poll is an unnecessary constraint. I can understand edits of an option losing any votes for it, but preventing me from adding new options is frustrating. The poll could simply be decorated with “Options edited by USER on DATE”. People can always update their choice.
I can edit someone’s post, but I can’t edit a poll?!? Please consider removing the five minute edit restriction and, if it helps, replace it with a “Poll edited after some votes were cast” decoration that shows if any votes were cast prior to the poll being edited.
Update: it gets even worse… I tried to edit my original post to explain that I’m not allowed to edit the poll options and how people can work around it… and Discourse won’t let me edit my post (even if I don’t make any change to the poll itself).
You can change this 5 min restriction by ssh your app
In the console, type these command one by one :
cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
vi /var/www/discourse/plugins/poll/plugin.rb
At 70-72% of the document, you can change the number 5 by 100000000, press Esc and CTRL+ZZ to save the new file. You’ll just need to type exit and finally a simple command ./launcher restart app to update your discourse, it works fine !
The hardest part for me was to create the ssh key, but i was a big newby at these things. Now it takes 30 sec to change that restriction.
I’m not sure that is a sustainable hack. When the poll plugin is updated and files checked out from GitHub, wouldn’t that value be overwritten again to the original value of 5?
Is this something that could be made into a site setting for the poll plugin?
We also have an issue where adding a poll to a wiki topic causes all kinds of pain, want to make sure this is on @zogstrip’s radar for next week, along with an adjustment here to ease things.
Can someone add this setting at least as a site wide setting ? because it’s extremely useful when you’re preparing a poll and working on it for couple of days (adding items) or you just made a mistake. If you want you can limit by first vote, so that until someone votes, the poll can be changed, or just give the admins(and only admins) the right to edit that.
Why don’t you prepare the list in your staff category (without [poll][/poll])?
Staff can suggest you other items and when you are ready to start you can change category and add [poll][/poll] (or, if you are on latest version, you can use the gear icon to set the poll with yout list)
That’s almost what I’m doing now… but I believe that I’m not the only one that thinks this setting needs to go to the admin panel at least, anyway, actually all settings like that should be able to be managed from the admin, without going through code.
We need to make things easier to manage, not hidden in code, so that we’ll need to spend time to figure out where we need to change the setting and possible crash everything in the process (you know, add a space in a yaml file and you’ll understand what I’m saying), or at the first Discourse update, your changes are lost.
Regardless of how long the default time should be, admins should have control on what they want this time to be, whether they choose to increase that time to 10+ minutes or even prevent them from changing the time at all.
@codinghorror maybe we just change this so moderators and staff can do whatever they want to polls whenever they want (alter options, delete poll, etc)
I feel this just popped up enough over the years that it warrants simplifying stuff here.
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