Restricting poll creation to Trust Levels

Is there currently a way of restricting poll creation to specific Trust Levels? For example, allowing Trust Level 4+ to create polls, and Trust Level 0+ to vote in them?

We have polls disabled as we don’t want poll creation to be available to all users. However, we would like Staff to be able to create them for the community to vote on.

Admin settings currently only provide two options: “Poll enabled” (yes/no checkbox) and a field for the maximum number of options allowed in a poll. Is there another way of setting this up?

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Possibly, how hard would this be @tgxworld? Only poll creation could be enforced, participation must be available to all users.

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Thanks Jeff!

Being able to restrict poll creation is all we’d need - participation in any poll that we’d create would be available to all users.

Is there a particular reason you are looking to block this.

One possible approach is to simply enable polls and watch what happens for a few week, maybe it will be a complete non-event

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I believe that was the case in an older (pre-Discourse) version of the forum, and it rapidly got out of hand… User-created polls dominated the more popular discussion categories, and some forum members felt that getting a majority vote on a poll option should immediately translate into the business allocating resources to that course of action.

Lots of pairs of eyes are fantastic at identifying problems, but not necessarily great at deciding how problems should be fixed - particularly if there are a lot of factors (technical or process) involved behind the scenes. Almost all of our community issues are things that we’re happy to get feedback on from the community, but we don’t want decision making via mob rule to be the default :wink:

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Maybe adding the voting plugin will be a less politicized way of having people express themselves? I’m suggesting this as a way people might be inclined to make less polls.

I’m inclined to agree with this restriction (TL3 to create polls).

Our forum is mostly teenagers and they have a tendency to want to create polls about many useless things that don’t apply to our forum.

Having to lock these and/or delete them is a waste of Moderators’ time.

Examples of useless polls
  • What time do you get up?
  • Have you farted today?
  • Is your favorite color red?

I could go on, but I think you can see the point.

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I disagree: a post is no less useless if it asks “when was the last time you farted” versus making it a poll.

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Perhaps “useless” was the incorrect word. Let’s say “Off Topic” in an anime forum.

Then wouldn’t it be appropriate to either Flag the post as such / Unlist the topic?

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Like this post if you farted today!

:grinning:

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Like this post if you did not fart today!

I get that this is about adding friction, but friction to abuse is just so low. Flagging is better.

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Again, these are teenagers, they don’t worry about silly things like Flags. And if their account is banned, they create another. Or enlist their friends to do so - it’s just endless.

But, I’m finished with this now. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen and I need to get over it and move on.

I suggest disabling polls altogether. Remember staff are immune to those kinds of disables anyway.

Can we confirm that the setting works this way @tgxworld? If staff manually enter a poll in a post, even with polls “disabled”, I think it should work. Sort of the same way that PMs being “disabled” works.

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If Staff manually enter a poll while that option is disabled forum-wide, can users still vote in them?

Opps not sure how I missed this. Server side it should be pretty easy but we’ll have to disable the dialect somehow for normal users.

Disabling polls disables it for everyone right now. Will have to add the feature in.

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Yes as of

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/4314?rebake-one-box-hax

:smile:

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That’s fantastic news. Thanks! :smiley:

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@eviltrout raised that this might be a little confusing as polls “disabled” should result in polls being totally unavailable on the instance. If we’re going to add a site setting like “Only Staff can create polls”, I think it won’t take much work to make it such that we can restrict polls to certain trust levels.

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No, this is also how PMs work. Disable PMs and you disable them for users,
but staff can still send messages. There is no way to turn messages all the
way off. Polls can be the same way.

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