Polls: Gimped To Near Unusability

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Alright, I've about had it with the changes to polls. Some of my main problems:

#1. You cannot choose more than 5 options. You now cannot even have a poll asking what continent you are from.

#2. The limit to how many letters in the poll is killing me. I cannot even put full user names in them sometimes.

#3. The final straw, the polls must now be posted within a few minutes of the thread. There are numerous times that it took me just that long to figure out how to shorten the questions to the allowed limit and missed out on the deadline.


I for one run a contest. I cannot put all the entries, I cannot put the names of all the full answers, and now even if the above weren't an issue I cannot post a poll in the contest thread. Because I've missed the deadline by, oh, about nine days, 23 hours and 55 minutes.

And it seems every week some new restriction has been put on them. It's quite intolerable

[Azrael]

In all sincerity, I suggest that if the polls are so problematic* that they are simply removed all together. There is nothing more aggravating than a "feature" that cannot be used with coherent results.

* As for the problematic part of things: Could someone explain what the issue is?

If it is a matter of bandwidth usage, again, I suggest removing them completely. I truly sympathize with the bandwidth woes, and do my part to help. To that end, I don't want "my" (and by "my" I mean Rich's $'s bandwidth) being sucked up for something so (at this point) completely stupid and useless as the polls have become.

One possible way to help *might* be to leave the poll concept more of less intact, capable of several (10? 15?) options but cut the character limit to only a single letter. The OP would be forced to spell out if ...

A) This idea generally sucks
B) This idea is awesome
C) I should dance the flamenco

in their first post. I think this method might retain the usefullness of the poll, but DRAMATICALLY cut down on the stupid crap.

If the issue at hand is simply a matter of the spammy tendencies formed by an abundance of stupid, useless polls -- I cannot conceive of a way to help the situation besides locking the worst offenders.

[Steward]

Well, it would certainly help if people weren't compelled to include an Obligatory Thog Option for everything.

[Om]

While I can understand that there are legitimate uses for polls, contests and so forth, I would not be sorry to see them go altogether. I'm assuming that bandwidth is the issue here.

To my mind it seems as though we're stuck at an unhappy compromise - polls are permitted but their options are very much limited. The end result is that we still get numerous inane polls in friendly yet they are unusable for those that really need them.

Is it possible to restrict the use of polls to certain subforums? This would allow people to make full use of the available polling options while cutting down on the actual number of polls being made.

[Mauril Everleaf]

I tried to post this earlier, but I guess it didn't stick.

Az, your "solution" doesn't fix the problem that VT has. He still can't create polls more than five minutes after the OP is posted. Since the contest threads usually gather information and submissions over a few weeks, this does no good, and aside from creating a new thread on the same subject (which is not allowed) there is no real way to set up a poll for them.

If polls could stay to certain sub-forums, that would be fine by me. Limit them to only the homebrew contest sections or somesuch. Or make it so that only mods can post polls, and that the requestor needs to PM a mod to do so. This adds a little bit of work for the mods, which makes it a hard sell, but it allows valid polls to be used anywhere in the forum, as long as the mods think that it's okay. This would allow as many poll options as the requestor needs and there would be no need for an arbitrary character limit.

Obviously, it's up to the mods, but that's my 2 cp.

[Azrael]

Az, your "solution" doesn't fix the problem that VT has. He still can't create polls more than five minutes after the OP is posted.

I chose not to address this issue, since the ability to create a poll after posting the 1st post is officially considered a bug -- there was a whole thread about it -- and may have since been "fixed".

[Lord Herman]

I don't think limiting polls to certain subforums is such a good idea. There are inane polls on every subforum, and I can think of a legitimate reason to post a poll for every subforum as well. I'm running a contest on the SMBG boards, and I'd hate to lose it because of a subforum-wide ban on polls.

Another thing to consider is the nature of these boards. One of the things I like about the GiantITP boards is that you are allowed to do silly things. Heck, there's a whole subforum for playing silly message board games; on most other boards, that would be considered a waste of bandwith. So although completely spammy polls shouldn't be allowed, I think completely banning all polls that don't serve an apparent purpose is going a bit too far.

As for the original subject; I agree with VT. The polls are severely limited right now. If you ask me, the number of options should be expanded to 10, and the length of each option could be a bit less restrictive.