How to make a poll

[LaRoza]

Polls are disabled in Support Forums.


You may see posts that have polls attached. You can post polls with your threads. Here is how to do it, and the best way to do it.

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When submitting a thread, you will have Additional Options below the text field and submit button. One of them is to post a poll, and how many options. You check that box, and choose a number. Then you submit the thread. You will be taken to a page to make the poll. The thread is visible during this time, so you may want to post that a poll is coming so people don't get confused.

Image of Additional Options:


Image of Poll Creation page:


You can:

• Have the poll expire. Good for topics which will become moot, e.g. "Who will win the election?"
• Allow multiple choices.
• Make votes public, so the voters can be seen. Usually good for asking someone's opinion on something and it matters who votes.

Some guidelines for making an effective poll:

• Make the poll title the same as the thread question. Do not have a poll with a different question than the thread. Asking "Is Opera better than Firefox?" in your thread title, and "Is Opera worse than Firefox?" in the poll will result in skewed results. People read the thread title first, and will answer that, instead of reading the poll question.
• Make the options make sense. Do not try to force answers on someone. Having the question "Which do you prefer?" and the options "Firefox, because it is free" and "Opera because Firefox sucks" will cause results to be wrong, because it implies people use Opera because Firefox sucks. Do not do such things when designing a poll.
• If you think you can get everyone in the poll, include an "Other" option, and ask for an explanation in a post. Also, it is a good idea to have an option to catch anything which may not apply to the options.
• You can set it so people can chose more than one option when designing the poll. If you do this, make it logical and make it clear that is a multi choice poll.
• Search for existing polls first. It makes little sense to have duplicate threads, and even less for duplicate polls.
• You cannot alter a poll, so think about it before hand!

If you do see something you want changed, you can report the thread and ask for it to be fixed and a staff member will correct it.