Quote from Rob on January 8, 2020, 1:34 pm

The new polling feature is great! My apologies if these suggestions have been made, but after searching here I could not find a few I would like to suggest:

• Ability to see the person and how they voted. This has 2 use cases to consider:
  • Only allow the administrator(s) to see this detail. In this case, the voting is considered sensitive and allowing the users to see the detail of the results is deemed to not be desirable. Another reason to have the poll set this way is to not influence how a voter will answer the poll.
  • Allow all users to see this detail. In this case, it is deemed desirable to see how everyone else voted.
  • In both cases, I would suggest that setting polls has a default at the forum level (only allow administrator or allow all), but each topic can also be changed by the administrator as needed.
  • To be able to scale showing who and what voted for 100’s or 1,000’s of people, a good approach to displaying it would be to put a little portlet/window below the poll with a number of users initially shown (perhaps the administrator can set how many) and a Show More/Show Less link to expand or contract it. Many forums with polls do it this way.
• Setting to position the poll all the way at the top (as it is now) or all the way on the bottom. This should have a default for the forum but can be changed per topic by the administrator. The use case here is obvious: sometimes the poll is really important and you want immediate exposure, but sometimes the poll is much less significant and having it on top can serve as a distraction for the discussion which is much more important! While putting the poll all the way on the bottom has the hazard of being buried by many screen pages of discussions, in this case also consider a link at the top of the topic which will “jump to poll” (which is jumping to the last page’s bookmark to where the poll is on that page).
• Consider allowing multiple polls. I don’t think an unlimited number of polls is wise, but there are good use cases to having 2, 3 or 4 polls. Of course, perhaps just documenting why only 1 poll can be in 1 topic would be equally sensible and the reason to be given follows a “bug fixing rule” where you only log 1 bug per issue so that the detail of the bug is not lost in other issues. To this end, I would be more than happy to document this scenario (as well as anything else needed!).