Why not? It’s not as if the poll would get in the way of the debate. For all intents and purposes, it would simply be an addendum to the conversation, an amusing curiosity, and/or a way to attract people to the thread.
While I’m curious as to why you don’t like the idea, I’d really like to here from a mod or admin about why polls are not allowed in GD. Is a matter of board performance, limiting polls to just a couple of forums so as not to slow us to a crawl? Or is about aesthetics, i.e. about not contaminating up our highfalutin *Debates *with plebeian yes/no boxes (I phrased that impartially, right?)?
In theory that may be so, but it’s likely impractical. Most of the people who vote in the poll will be people who didn’t follow the preceding thread, thus defeating the purpose, and if the poll is in a different forum (with a whole group of different posters to see it), starting the poll will probably reboot the discussion to some degree (either in GD or IMHO).
It works pretty well in practice, actually. The sticker would be your second point, when the poll and discussion are in different forums… which has a number of solutions, the most obvious (to me) being either to disallow any GD material in polls or to allow polls to be posted in GD.
Personally, I don’t think that polls should be used in any debate thread–the point (for me, at least) of Great Debates has never been in finding out how many Members, each with varying degrees of interest in the topic, clicked on a Yes or a No or a Maybe button, but in discovering the reasoning behind those choices.
Well, I am under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that just comnig into a GD thread and posting “me too” or “I agree” is considered pretty bad form. Right now, it’s easy to suss out the psoter who does that, because his name is right there above the post.
In a poll, you’d have to somehow browse through all the responses and then cross check them against the people who actually posted to the thread.’
It’s a DEBATE forum, I suppose having a poll there might make tallying more convenient, but what is the point of just tallying up yes
o\maybe with no real meat behind it? The whole point of debating is not to prove who has the most popular opinion, it’s to see who can argue for the best position.
It’s not a matter of *just *tallying up the yes/no/maybes, but of *also *tallying them: having a poll at the top of the thread isn’t going to stop anyone who wants to from having a debate (as can be seen from the recent IMHO examples in which the mods couldn’t *stop *people from breaking the rules and arguing).
And even if a poll did hinder a meatier discussion within the resulting thread, so what? Would my yes/no/maybe tallying in GD Thread A do anything to screw up the debate in GD Thread B?
Look, either we allow arguing in IMHO (which the mods seem rather strongly opposed to), or we allow polls in GD (which has no obvious downside), or we completely disallow starting polls about politics (which is absurd). People want to start polls about politics, and respondents to the polls are going to want to have a back & forth about the topic; these are both fine things, so we should be able to find a way to make it happen.
Not to belabor the point, but the forum description is:
*
“What’s your favorite …?” For frank exchanges of views on less-than-cosmic topics. This is also the place for polling.*
Frank exchanges of views = debate, at least to me, and politics is less than cosmic.
If there is now a strict “no debating” rule, perhaps the description should be updated.
Look, folks. I actually don’t mind a little give and take in IMHO poll threads-as long as they don’t result in debates that would normally be put in the Great Debates forum. The major problem with the two political threads I eventually closed was that, except for the addition of the poll, it was no different than similar debates over in GD.
I’m with you on this one. It’s not just tallying, but another way to extract data. It doesn’t detract from the meat, just makes it visual. I say polls should be allowed in GD.
There is no harm, any more than there is “harm” in placing recipes in Great Debates or rants in ATMB. Are you proposing that we do away with all forum descriptions and let people post what they want where they want?
If you believe that debating something that comes up in In My Humble OPINION is the same as placing recipes in Great Debates, well, assuming it’s permitted in this forum (as it is/was in others) for the OP’er to request it, then please close this thread.
What you haven’t actually answered is why it is the case that a debate that begins in IMHO must come to a crashing halt when it manages to evolve into something more properly started in Great Debates. Usually, the method for dealing with the situation would be to move the thread, but since the polling feature can’t be used in the forum, perhaps a bit more leniency regarding spontaneously emerging debates from polls in IMHO would make more sense?
Which forces a scism between the debate and the poll that has spawned it. Which, as people here are saying to you, is not an optimal situation.
And you have yet to establish why it can’t be done the way they are suggesting, which would avoid the scism.
Why is it that moderators seem to have trouble saying something like: “oh, I didn’t think of that. Maybe I’ll try it and see.”
