Polls need to be Editable by Moderators and Admins

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I run a medical related forum with mostly non-technical users. They get the polls formatted wong a majority of the time. Its a real pain because I usually don’t see them within the 5 minute edit window - so they are not a good experience for any of the users, and it just turns the average user off the polls.

At a minimum the polls need to be editable by moderators and admins so that we can fix them so that they actually work. As it is right now - most of the poll attemps on my forums are unsuccessful.

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Staff members can edit options well after the 5-minute window. But, that’s pretty much all that’s allowed.

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Basically, anything else would necessitiate throwing out all the votes.

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Even when its something as basic as the person forgetting to put “poll” before and after the list of options, with associated type, or forgetting the space before and after the “-”?

It just seems that for a poll that isn’t working anyway - its better that we allow some editing (and yes, throwing out the votes is fine in most of my cases because there are no votes - the poll is inoperable.

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The spelling mistakes users make in polls are both quite funny and disturbing to other users (asking why hasn’t it been fixed by a moderator).

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I guess I could allow staff members to change polls when there are no votes.

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I agree, it’s frustrating that I can’t fix polls if I don’t get there quickly enough. I understand the rationale for not changing polls after a grace period, but not being able to turn a broken poll into a working poll is annoying.

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Can you give me an example of a broken poll?

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Let me see if I can find one of the ones I was testing with.

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I assume as an admin, you can access this?

https://community.imgur.com/t/poll-testicle-poll-thing/10674?u=amiathena

It won’t allow me to edit it into a functioning poll.

Edit: and pardon the testicles, the Regulars were having fun with title editing in the Lounge. :3

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Awesome. Mind if I do some tests there?

(I don’t mind the testicles at all :stuck_out_tongue: )

EDIT: Ok, I see the issue now. I might be able to fix it.

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A little belated, but sure, go nuts! I think half the topics in the Lounge are for testing anyway.

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Also, and I don’t know if this is expected behavior or a bug or what… even though it errors on making that a poll, it shows the edits on the history.

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The empty edit is the same bug I fixed last week but isn’t deployed to imgur yet.

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I thought it might be related, but I figured I should mention it just in case it was something else, since this case is behaving a little differently from the flagged post one.

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Surely the underlying issue is that Polls are confusing for new users to create?

Which of course has a much more complicated solution than “make the edit window longer for admins”

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Over at the Fairphone Forum we have long learned that polls are not very representative and can in no means be used as democratic tools (example) so we really don’t get why we can’t add options to polls that already have votes.
We already restarted this poll to allow multiple selections but a bit later we realized that the option “transparent” should be added. Sure we could close and restart the poll again, loosing all existing votes, but it’s a bit annoying.

A great use for that would be a wishlist. People should be able to vote on existing suggestions and submit new suggestions whenever they come up with them.

I get that this maybe shouldn’t be enabled by default with forums that have hundreds of moderators. But at the Fairphone Forum we are just 3 moderators that pretty much run the forum. Meaning if only admins were granted this right that wouldn’t help us much. :smile:

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I’ve always only seen the polls as entertainment for our users - thought they provide some rough feedback for people on what the community thinks about an issue.

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Just hit this, I wikified the poll to get more option before starting it on the Staff category.

Maybe we can allow edition before the first vote?

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They’ve implemented it now so you can do some editing in the text around the poll - though I’m not sure about the actual poll. I’d test it. I agree - editing before the first vote makes sense.