Back to talking about Poll functionality

Kosmo

My toughts on the poll is, it's not like politics, if we have a community vote, I'd sure would like to know why you voted for something, and when people can see what you voted, you have to stand behind your vote and not flipflop, which would ultimately destroy the poll. And as for the "If you are going to force people to comment when they vote, why have them vote, if you have to read all the comments anyways? Thats my thoughts." Example, you have a community with 10,000 users, and you have an important poll, are you going to read through roughly 30,000 posts (if it is an important issue) and having the possibility of non clear opinions like "I'm kinda against the for it, but I'm not sure", the poll is for a fast way of checking how the poll is progressing, the comment is for them to have the time to explain themselfs. But, they are not forced to do that. I completely loathe anonymous posting in a community, faceless people are worst kind there is.

Krak

Ok, yeah , I see your point, ok, it makes sense...And I agree about the anon posting. For a quick pop in, ask a simple question, pop out deal, a guest account or something is needed though. But to allow everyone to post anon messeges, ack. If you just needed something like 1 simple support question, forcing them to reg and login is kind of a deterent to ask for help. Its hard to keep the two seperate I guess though. Maybe you could allow anon postings only in certain categories or something.. Oops, just a tad off topic.

Sekt

I'm also heavily in favour of a poll extension. I understand not adding it to the core of Vanilla and completely agree with that. I think the beauty of Vanilla is that it's quite a pure base to build upon. To the people saying 'why not use phpBB?', my personal feeling is that Vanilla is a much nicer looking system with better functionality and a much better interface. I like it because it doesn't have all the excess crap that phpBB and the likes come with, but still has the option to add the functionality you need. The reality is that some people find polls extremely useful given the role that their forums play. This may not be the case for you personally, but that doesn't make it any less valid for those who do require them. As for placement, I think that more often than not, when a thread contains a poll, the poll is the focus of that thread. As such, the top of the thread seems a logical place for it. It's the first thing that catches your eye and makes it easy to vote straight away. The bottom could also be useful if you want people to actually give the poll some thought and perhaps first read replies before voting. I'm not in favour of requiring a post to vote, it would lead to too many pointless posts made simply for the sake of voting. Perhaps the creator of the poll thread could select whether the poll votes are private or not. Having them public would enable everyone to see who voted for what. I definately like the idea of perhaps displying it next to the person's username if they post in the thread. A collapsable div would be good as well, as it allows you to see the votes of those who haven't posted. Hmm, yeah. Someone should make it, it'd be really handy.