Creating Polls

by **The Godfather** November 5th 2007, 12:15 pm

Creating Polls

What is a Poll?

According to Wikipedia :

Wikipedia wrote:
Opinion polls are surveys of opinion using sampling. They are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by asking a small number of people a series of questions and then extrapolating the answers to the larger group.

So, a poll is used to know the different points of view of each people. The members who voted stay anonymously.

How to create a poll?

In this field, put the title for the topic (The topic title is no necessarily the poll question. Example: Your favourite fruits).
In this block, you must put a message which explains or introduce the poll (Example : There are dozens of different fruits in the world. Some of them are surely better than others according to your personal tastes... Which are your favourite friuts?)
Put a title to yoru poll. This must be short, but explicative. The members refer often to the question to vote. (Example: Which are your favourite fruits?)
Place here your different options for your poll. They must be separated by a line break. The default max number of choices is configurated to 10. This value can be modified in your admin panel: "General Forum Messages & Email Max number of poll options". The highest value you can place here, is 50.

If the value you entered is 10, this means that you can integrate 10 choices maximum to your polls. this value can't be exceeded, but the number of choices can be lower than 10.

Here is how to separate the poll options :
Indicate the number of days while your members can vote. If you want this value to be unlimited (until you close it manually), write "0" or simply leave this field blank.
Tick one of these two checkboxes, according to the type of poll you want: Multiple-choice poll or Non-multiple-choice poll. Multiple choice allows you to choose more than one poll option per vote.

Multiple choice poll (Examples) :

-Your favourite fruits
-Your favourite sports
-etc.

Non-multiple choice poll (Examples) :

-Do you want a shoutbox on the forum ?
-Should the forum install a right-click disabling script ?
-etc.

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Here is what the members should see :

1- Here is what the members see when they haven't voted yet :

Creating Polls Polls310

2- Here is what the members see once the first choices ticked (If Multiple choice poll : Yes is ticked)

Creating Polls Polls410

3- Here's what the members see once they submitted their vote(s) :

Creating Polls Polls510

*The blue bars which are displayed when we see the results can be modified in your admin panel:

Display

Pics Management

Advanced Mode

Vote bar - left / Vote bar - Center / Vote bar - right

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How to put a poll on my portal?

First of all, the poll must have been created already on your forum - you cannot create one directly on the portal, you virtually just link to a poll in your forum.

If the poll has been created, you can add your poll module into your portal. Once you added the module and saved, you can click this icon Creating Polls Editer

on that widget to choose a poll from your forum.

How to reset the votes back to zero?

All of this is done in four simple steps :

1- Edit your first post of the thread that contains the poll
2- Tick the checkbox "Delete the poll"
3- Click on "Send"
4- Edit your first post and add the poll again

How do I manually close a poll?

In the top right corner of the poll (location can vary in different forum versions), you'll find an icon with a cross. Click it to close the poll for all members - nobody can cast a vote anymore.

Can I define who is allowed to cast a poll?

Yes, you can do that in your forum permissions as this is defined for each of your forums individually. Go to "General / Categories & Forums" and click on the forum you want to modify and switch then to the permissions tab. Eventually, you have to enable the advanced mode first. Now just mark the appropriate boxes for "create a poll" and "vote.