Tracking open polls

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@shanemcd and I were discussing how to make sure we’re aware of any in-progress polls, so that interested people can make sure they’re not missing out. This is pretty important.

Sadly, unlike solved/unsolved posts, the Search tool cannot show us open polls - I’d sent feedback to Discourse on that, so it may improve later.

We can obviously add a tag like vote or similar to a topic when a vote starts, but this is dependant on people remembering to add the tag. Given votes are open for some time and any moderator can add the tag, this should be fairly safe, and we should do this so that people can follow that tag.

However, as an additional safeguard, I’ve written an SQL query to pull out the active polls, and I’ve hooked that up to a report on my stats platform (Connect). You can see the report here and it refreshes every hour. I’ve also added it to the Discourse sidebar so you don’t have to remember the URL:

2023-08-22-121312_194x188_scrot
2023-08-22-121312_194x188_scrot194×188 2.84 KB

Some feedback I’d like:

  • Are we missing other ways to know about polls/votes?
  • Is this sufficient for being informed about polls?
  • What tag should be use? (I favour “active-vote” but ideas are welcome)
  • Is the table useful? What extra features should it have?
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A couple of thoughts:

  • Maybe still add a ‘vote’ or ‘poll’ tag? Some people might prefer that.
  • On the table, the SC might appreciate if the vote logic could autocount SC vs other votes?
  • What happens with closed polls? Will they still show up in that table?
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I said we should do that, so yes, I agree :slight_smile:

Right now there’s no totaling, so the votes collapse into a single row. If/when I add vote totals I’ll add “votes counted” into the grouping, so that you get one row per vote.

No, it only lists open ones.