The version of VBulletin now used by SDMB (2.2.1) comes with a poll feature that has been disabled by the Admins/mods. It allows any user to initiate a poll and invite votes for up to 10 items. This would have been an ideal feature to use for a recent thread where dopers were asked to vote for their favorite short story of 8 presented:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=107090
Objections that I have seen to enabling this feature are:
[ul][li]It is a new VB feature and may be buggy[/li][li]It adds extra load on the already-overburdened server[/ul][/li]Both may be right, but is this worth a reconsideration? (I have used polls on my tiny Door County Message Board with no obvious bugs, but I really don’t know how much load they impose on the server.)
Just a suggestion.
We still have way too many people being shut out of the board, the demand since our return has been higher than ever.
Heck, even I’m having problems getting to the board all too often in the course of a day and I’m most often on enforcement matters.
Any little extras will just have to wait for now, we really do have bigger fish to fry.
Sorry.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
When I saw that this version of vB had polls, I thought “hey, ideal for IMHO”, but most often the polls in IMHO aren’t asking you to choose one of a fixed set of options, but rather just to name your favourite variety of X.
I suppose they would be marginally useful for polls of the type “is X acceptable in a public place?” where only Yes and No answers are normally expected.
Ooo, polling. So instead of getting interesting written responses to queries, we just get pointless statistics! Sounds swell.
The way VB works, you can reply to a poll by voting and/or commenting. If you vote, VB prevents you from doing it again (in the same thread, of course!). And it doesn’t force you to cast a vote if you only want to post a text reply.
So polling doesn’t replace a post, it just adds an option. But I can certainly see TubaDiva’s concerns. She has to chose the size of her fish!
Personally, I have always enjoyed a good Perch Fry on a Friday nite. 