I don’t recall what release version, but AFAIK it is a “blessed” plugin, not a feature per se.
I get the impression from what I’ve read here that most Discourse sites don’t use polls at all, and for most of those that do, it rarely gets used.
So for those sites that are the exception, it might be best to have the “advanced” or “help” tied to the plugin and not the Core code.
Not opposed to a gear glyph on editor, for advanced formatting, as stated earlier… it just needs to be scheduled work and UI built for it.
This is a bit unfair.
We are open to building this, but have plenty other more pressing needs.
Polls are listed since 1.3 as being officially supported, and the poll plugin is now part of the main repo. Maybe @codinghorror or @sam can confirm either way?
fair enough. I got, (the clearly wrong) impression that the team is opposed to expose this further.
MHO the welcome message is not sufficient for this. There should be just the most important functions there because the welcome message is usually read at most once and then the less important topics from it get forgotten.
Certainly the most important thing I am missing in Discourse is a formatting help. It should be easily accessible when the edit box is open. Something like on Stack Exchange:
The “advanced” button with a menu of the advanced formatting functions could be helpful too. Though I have the gear icon suggested by @codinghorror connected with configuration / advanced parameters and not other functions. As I noticed here in Discourse the gear icon is already being used for the user’s profile “Preferences”.
Do you use any other shortcode plugins? How are you educating users as to their existence?
I agree that the welcome message is good for presenting the most important and some selected less important functions but IMHO it cannot supply the online help.
It is good that a user learns about the possibility to create polls but showing the syntax there is not so useful. If the user does not see use for polls while reading the welcome message or shortly later he simply forgets the syntax and probably the place where it was written too.
See my prior post
Here is the plugin topic (so you can create the ? help in your instance today)
Man, I searched for a while before coming across your blog post via this post. I’ve taken the liberty of doing a quick and dirty copy of your post into a howto topic.
The gear is now present in the editor, so we can start adding more “builder” UI there for rare functions like poll.
That’s on my list, but I’m waiting for @eviltrout to finish replacing the editor with the ember version first 
Sorry if I missed something but I can still not see any way to find out about the poll feature in the UI. Was this gear icon removed?
No, but there is a plugin for it.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/poll-ui-adding-polls-through-a-ui-in-the-composer-window/35133
Please figure out a way to make it such that those who have the plugin installed don’t have their upgrade break because the plugin is in both the plugin list and in discourse.
If past experience (from an outside view) continues through, Discourse will likely inherit the plugin, make alterations to bring it to their standards and then the existing plugin will become an empty shell (so it shouldn’t conflict – provided you keep your version of Discourse up-to-date).
There is a UI now, press the gear button in the editor.