Ed Zotti, please turn on the poll feature.
WTF? Why is everybody suddenly so exercised about the poll feature? It’s enabled on a couple of other message boards I go to and it is really not all that exciting. Actually, IMO it leads to people posting a bunch of stupid polls just for the sake of posting polls. I vote no on polls. (See, even without a poll feature I was able to cast my vote and you were able to read it! Amazing.)
It’s a bitch to collect poll data on this board. Using this feature the answers are tallied and the people have to stick to the format. Asking for a yes or no answer is futile as it still doesn’t get answered that way no matter how much you explain the need to do so.
Why do you care if other people want polls? No, seriously. Why is it that just because you have no trouble filtering through posts to determine the responses to poll questions, you assume that everyone is gifted with the same astonishing ability? It’s like telling people they shouldn’t have calculators because you are able to multiply four digit numbers in your head.
You just inadvertently gave the answer yourself. I had to read 4 annoying sentences to get to your vote. If I was actually going to tally a text based poll, lots of people would editorialize like that and make it a lot more trouble.
I think the novelty would quickly wear off and poll making would settle at a pace slightly above the current rate.
I think “everybody” is “so exercised” because the glacial pace of innovation and an entrenched “frills hurt my eyes!” attitude around here can get a little frustrating.
I want the poll feature turned on because:
A. it would be really great,
B. the Democrats want to steal my flamethrowers,
C. Jimmy Fallon sucks and Conan rules,
D. All of the above,
E. Only EDUCATED MORONS THINK A[SUP]2[/SUP] + B[SUP]2[/SUP] = C[SUP]2[/SUP] FASCIST IDOLATRY
6. Six,
F. FAIL,
G. None of the above,
H. All of the above except G,
I. This answer intentionally left blank,
J. All of the above except H but including G,
K. J makes no sense,
M. Emacs,
N. Stick shift,
O. This letter looks like zero,
P. I’d like to give you a real “polling” if you know what I mean,
Q. I know what you mean,
R. I don’t know what you mean,
S. I know what you mean, except for what you mean in answer P,
T. Elmo,
U. vi,
V. vee,
W. Jesus,
X. Satan,
Y. ZOMBIES,
26. Twenty-six
What is the point of this in this serious discussion? No explanation given, just a random list.
I’m interested mostly because it would be a new toy to play with, but I can’t help but be fascinated by the stonewalling the admins are giving us. Bullshit answers like “it’s up the pipeline” and “I’d be fired as an admin if I turned it on without express permission from his holiness Ed Zotti” make me wonder what the real reason they won’t do it is, although I have my suspicions.
That wasn’t one of the choices.
I hereby demand that Harmonious Discord be banned forthwith.
I’m sure it’s his hilarious way of saying polls are generally stupid. Why he thinks this will differ greatly from regular IMHO and MPSIMS threads he doesn’t explore. I guess he thinks actually reading through “How do you wipe?” and “What’s your favourite number?” threads are a step above for some reason.
To answer Liberal’s question about why I care, it’s because historically, this board has a bad history of implementing features without everything going all fuckety. If polls could be implemented without problems/critical timeouts/dead hamsters/etc, then that would be swell, but I am not very optimistic about this. I also really don’t feel this topic is so important that we need to have multiple threads going about it, but I realized a long time ago that I am not supreme arbiter of what is important. (Just to forestall the inevitable question about who made me the supreme arbiter of what is important.)
This is important because we need to know that somebody with power on the staff actually cares enough about this board to take responsibility for tweaking the controls to improve board function. Everybody passes the buck upstairs and nothing gets done: no polls, useless search functionality, and we as members are supposed to like it or lump it.
For God’s sake, if Ed can’t be bothered to do any of this stuff then let one of the admins/mods ask him for the authority to do it themselves. We have Jerry’s word that that this won’t bring the whole thing grinding to a halt. If a tweak doesn’t work it can be reversed with no problems at all.
This isn’t rocket science.
Who here thinks friedo left out a comma somewhere? Show of hands.
The only feature I remember being added which screwed things up was the rss feed, which is an entirely different ballgame. There really is no likelihood of any of those problems you noted with implementing polls.
I agree that another thread was a little over the top but I guess Muffin thought putting Ed’s name in the title would make the difference as far jumping to the top of the “pipeline”. This is really only the second thread as Tuba closed the first one without comment on the actual issue.
I don’t think you do actually understand that importance is relative. You seem to intellectually understand that you should understand that it is relative, in a theoretical sense, but it appears that the understanding stops at that point.
I wonder how much the IMHO forum will go haywire with polls. I love the idea, and think they could be implemented really well. But I also think they’d inundate most of the forums. And you can’t really dedicate a new forum to polls, because they span at least three of the forums nicely (IMHO, Cafe Society and Game Room). Christ - with the number of fantasy football threads currently in GR, can you imagine the carnage if everyone started posting “Who should I start” polls?!
IMHO is the forum for polls. Threads started in other forums already tend to be closed or moved there if the mods deem them too poll-ish. Mods can simply continuing banishing threads to poll-land or applying the poll-lock.
Now now, TWDuke, are you suggesting we create more work for the already overworked volunteers that give up their time and their health for the thankless job that is moderator of the SDMB? How very thoughtless of you. It could be as bad as it was back when Giraffe decided to start moving all the self-proclaimed “lame” rants from the Pit to MPSIMS. That was a terrible week or two before people figured things out.
Besides, turning polls on is just too stinking hard and will probably cause the server to collapse into a black hole, destroying the Earth and much of the solar system. This in turn would cause intergalactic travelers going through our sector to have to make a course correction. Can you live with forcing these unwary explorers to have to adjust their trajectory or run the risk of being 10-15 space minutes late to their destination?
I see very few people exercised about it at all, far fewer than are exercised about new smilies anyway.
I agree that the poll feature should be turned on. That allows for both easy tallying and editorializing in the same thread.
I’ll add, as a former IMHO mod, I’d have had no objection to the poll feature.
It’s understandable that you’d be queasy, but let me (try to) explain how polls work and why they are no extra load on the server. (I’m not very good at explaining things sometimes)
Polls use an HTML element called a “radio button”. For each choice in a poll, there is one radio button. Each radio button transmits to the next page exactly one byte of data (either a 1 for yes or a 0 for no, typically — sometimes yes is -1, and sometimes no is just null, or empty.) And so setting up 10 responses to a poll takes fewer bytes than transmitting the phrase “fewer bytes”.
That’s why it’s no extra load on the server.