Hump Day: do you use the poll feature?

[Jordan Miller]

 

Hey team, Happy Hump Day! 

I just recently penned a blog entry on our new reporting and metrics added into 4.6.8 (out now btw 🎉). It got me thinking about another means to collect data directly from your members is our polls feature!

I think the poll system in topics is an underrated gem of our platform.

It's engaging, easy to participate with and provides real results. You can even share the poll for others to partake in (and its results) across any page of your community using the poll block inside the Block Manager. It's a pretty nifty feature we don't talk about enough! 

Would love for you to participate in this poll and also hear from you!

As always, here's a roundup of updates/fixes our devs accomplished in the last week. Mad props to them!

- Changed value for prune_member_history setting from null to an empty string for Cloud.
- Fixed a broken getLastComment link in the forumRow template.
- Fixed an issue where the topic summary may only show 3 top posts instead of 4 if the topic contains many guest posts.
- Added reputation titles & icons back to the Reputation Activity page in user profiles.
 - Changed value for prune_member_history setting from null to an empty string for Cloud.
- Improved the club landing page for closed clubs to return an error with further information.
- Fixed the badges for 'seven consecutive days' and 'Five Hundred Items'.
- Fixed an issue where it wasn't possible to delete the Apple startup icon.
- Fixed an issue where email exceptions did not show the correct message in debug mode.
- Optimized deletions from Redis after processing content views.
- Fixed an issue where text direction was not set correctly in some emails.
- Fixed an issue where creating an OAuth2 login method would result in an array with IN_DEV. 
- Fixed an error shown if a shipping order is deleted for a no longer existing invoice.
- Fixed an issue where member group formatting may break the who's online and active user widgets.
- Removed no longer used sitemapLinks functions.
- Fixed unreliable sorting on the admin control panel tasks table.
- Added some missing rel=nofollow attributes on add new content links.
- Fixed an issue where no default badge was shown in the admin control panel streams list.
- Added a missing search keyword for block caching.
- Fixed an issue where editing anonymous items could change the author.
- Fixed a broken link when configuring VigLink.
- Fixed some missing email template titles.
- Fixed the duplicate rel attribute in the facebook share link.
- Fixed a missing search keyword for block caching.
- Fixed some missing rel=nofollow attributes on add new content links.
- Fixed a niche issue with the Marketplace interface showing an entity instead of dollar sign in some browsers.
- Removed no longer used sitemapLinks functions.
- Fixed an issue where pagination links could redirect to the wrong location when using Blog categories.
- Fixed the design on the Zapier Integration page and added the clipboard copy button for easier data copying.

Do you use polls in your own community? Do you have any ideas that could benefit this feature? Any feedback/input would be greatly appreciated.

[Colonel_mortis]

• One frequent complaint that I see is that every question is mandatory, which forces members to add a "not applicable" option when they have multiple questions.
• The poll title is a waste of time, given that there's already a topic title and poll question title
• I think it would be really neat if polls were attached to posts rather than to topics - that would force people to actually read the first post before answering the poll, and would allow for people to add polls in replies (and other places such as status updates) too

[Jordan Miller]

18 hours ago, Colonel_mortis said:

• One frequent complaint that I see is that every question is mandatory, which forces members to add a "not applicable" option when they have multiple questions.
• The poll title is a waste of time, given that there's already a topic title and poll question title
• I think it would be really neat if polls were attached to posts rather than to topics - that would force people to actually read the first post before answering the poll, and would allow for people to add polls in replies (and other places such as status updates) too

Great suggestions! I like the idea of members being able to add a poll directly into their post. I wonder if it would get lost or buried in an active topic though? Cool ideas. 👌 

[Sonya*]

21 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

Any feedback/input would be greatly appreciated.

I assume the first issue is a bug.

[Colonel_mortis]

1 hour ago, Jordan Miller said:

Great suggestions! I like the idea of members being able to add a poll directly into their post. I wonder if it would get lost or buried in an active topic though? Cool ideas. 👌 

If there are polls in the middle of the topic then yeah they could definitely get lost, but I would imagine polls like that to be pretty ephemeral anyway - if you want a poll that everyone sees, you add it to the first post (or recommend it).

[Adriano Faria]

I think polls could be displayed on a specific page, like a poll wall, and preferably, not tied to a topic or blog entry. Someone may want to crate a poll and would be more useful to not tie it to a topic/blog entry; then the poll wall would be the place.

Currently they're buried in a topic or entry and a simple "?" in topics list, for example, doesn't seem to draw much attention.

[marklcfc]

Different options, such as sliders, to rate 1-10. I have had an app written for my site to add ratings to certain topics which include sliders but its not perfect.

https://www.foxestalk.co.uk/topic/127178-match-ratings-leeds-1-1-leicester-city-vote-now/

Edited November 11, 2021 by marklcfc

[Telemacus2]

Sometimes I'd like to allow guests to vote (perhaps using ip checking to prevent people voting multiple times). 

Sure, I understand that poll results wouldn't be as trustworthy, but sometimes the whole point of a poll is to encourage people to participate. Also, it is very frustrating for a guest to click on a poll topic only to be told "sorry, you can't read the results...". Yes, this might encourage some to register, but it'd be nice to have the choice of having the option to make polls where we let everyone vote or just registered members.

[Claudia999]

You shouldn‘t think about polls only in threads. We need polls in Pages, in articles, too.

[Jordan Miller]

Just wanted to pass along the Twitter results in contrast to the results here 

 

 

[Jordan Miller]

On 11/11/2021 at 11:21 AM, marklcfc said:

Different options, such as sliders, to rate 1-10. I have had an app written for my site to add ratings to certain topics which include sliders but its not perfect.

https://www.foxestalk.co.uk/topic/127178-match-ratings-leeds-1-1-leicester-city-vote-now/

Nice idea! 

[Chris Anderson]

Show the amount of page views for polls to admins.  If thousands of people view a poll but only 20 people bother to participate then that is a useful metric to know.

If only 5 people view a poll then it makes sense that a small percentage of the membership were actually aware of the poll.  

 

[GazzaGarratt]

I look at polls probably way more as a key feature of Invision more than most. So much so, I use the Poll Wall plugin that is available on third party to separate all polls from the forums sections as poll make you do something different to just posting a discussion point.

The way we currently create polls are very cumbersome, mainly due to the amount of info needed as it is linked to a topic thread. Multiple headers can confuse even me at the best of times. Solution wise, Polls should be a separate creation to a 'Topic', even if once posted it looks very similar to one like it does today. Many places in social media can make a poll in seconds (like your Invision Twitter poll @Jordan Miller 🙂), so we need to reduce those steps to enable greater throughput.

To support all of this, it would then be ideal to have dynamic widgets at your disposal. A slider, with multiple polls selected would be a great engagement tool to entice people to interact with your site. Rather than a static poll that you can only select one per block.

And like @Adriano Faria said above, greater integration with pages is the key. You've already built engagement links in the new Achievements, which is a super start. We just need to make them more visible and usable.

[Adriano Faria]

42 minutes ago, GazzaGarratt said:

And like @Adriano Faria said above, greater integration with pages is the key. You've already built engagement links in the new Achievements, which is a super start. We just need to make them more visible and usable.

Me? No. I want exactly the opposite: create polls without tie them to topics, blog entries or whatever. 

It’s pretty weird the need to create a topic to ask questions in a poll!

[GazzaGarratt]

37 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Me? No. I want exactly the opposite: create polls without tie them to topics, blog entries or whatever. 

It’s pretty weird the need to create a topic to ask questions in a poll!

I think we mean the same thing but I said it in a very different way 😄 I completely agree it is weird...I was trying to keep my expectations low to start with though!! 😁

[kims79]

Hello,

A better integration and visibility of the surveys would be great indeed!

Why not make page more powerful and allow the creation of a multi-survey system like Google form via a database with several types of form fields? (Checkbox, free room, value, ect...) to collect the answers in the back with the possibility to integrate them in the topics via a javascript call? 

During our previous polls for the creation of a card game via the association, we had to redirect our community to vote via google form, which is a pity, since our Facebook/discord users are not the same, some would have certainly taken advantage of it to finally register 🙂
Kims
 

[Chris Anderson]

@Jordan MillerAre you asking for input to marginally improve upon polls or to make them truly useful to "many" more sites?  A couple of easy, quick additions are unlikely to improve upon their usefulness in enough of a meaningful way for customers to use them much more.

If IPS is interested in making polls truly useful then more customers need to be queried as to what an ideal feature set would look like and they would need to assign sufficient development resources towards it. Is that on their radar for next year?

Edited November 17, 2021 by Chris Anderson

[Sonya*]

8 days later, only 28 members voted in the poll in this topic. The participation is not good for a number of active users in this community. Why? What do you think @Jordan Miller? Why is it so?

• Is it because the poll feature itself is something the most admins do not use and therefore they do not participate?
• Or is it because this poll has not been seen/found by the most users in the community?

What do you think?

[Adriano Faria]

3 minutes ago, Sonya* said:

Or is it because this poll has not been seen/found by the most users in the community?

That’s exactly what I said in my first post. A poll wall (a page to display all polls) would make a difference here.

[Jordan Miller]

5 hours ago, Sonya* said:

8 days later, only 28 members voted in the poll in this topic. The participation is not good for a number of active users in this community. Why? What do you think @Jordan Miller? Why is it so?

• Is it because the poll feature itself is something the most admins do not use and therefore they do not participate?
• Or is it because this poll has not been seen/found by the most users in the community?

What do you think?

Great questions. I actually think 28 is a decent number considering this forum is exclusives to active license members. Would be cool to see more engagement though! 

There's a number of reasons this could have performed just ok. Maybe it was a boring question, maybe people don't care about the poll feature, maybe it was hard to find, or maybe it did perform well. Still kind of unpacking it. I do think there's a lot of value still! Appreciate you weighing in @Sonya*!
 

[kmk]

Please consider integrate check list 📃 functionality. 

In each item can assign who or which group mark it as done. Example, I create a check list of 5 items, each item can be marked done by specific members. Set each item send alert automatically by hours, days, weeks, month, years or custom, to that member, so that member will alert to review if that item ready to be marked as done or not. If that item has been marked as done, stop sending alert, but there show a message say: x member has x item mark as done, Something like the message of a post modified. 

[GazzaGarratt]

Hi @Jordan Miller, did this feedback help towards anything coming soon for polls at all?