Thread:Fossiliferous/@comment-26384327-20150801150138/@comment-24668482-20150801185350

I think we are basically on the same page.

My response in the Locked board's repository was entirely a response to OlyerD's suggestion:

"how about a poll to find out when people are playing, since it seems to me that if someone is "connected" their board is opened."

and not about polls on the wiki in general. I saw his post and wanted to help with the request (and figured it was time to update the poll anyway) so tried to figure out a way of doing such a poll within the confines of the poll feature on the wiki. The beast above was the best I could come up with and I immediately scrapped it as knew it would not work in the way that it was needed to. So instead I suggested another way that seeing exactly when people were playing this weekend might be achieved. I don't know if it would have worked or not, or if it would have provided any additional information about the problem, but it seemed like a (slightly) better way (to me).

When I asked 'does it show who voted for what', again I was only thinking of it as a once off for the above request. There is no point in having a poll that asks when people are playing when you can't see who picked what response (as still wouldn't know if a locked board player was playing as wouldn't know which vote they were). The wiki's current polling system doesn't show who picks what response, and I actually wouldn't want it to as, apart from this one instance, it is not a productive feature (if anything, having your name plastered on your response would only turn people off voting on our normal polls, which sometimes have controversial options.okay not controversial, but options that allow players to express their frustration with somethingin the game). So going to an outside source for the poll to fulfil the above request, having that function (like a free doodle poll would), would be beneficial. But in general, it would not be necessary.

In terms of the abilty to pick multiple options, the wiki polls can't do that (yet) and it would be a nice feature for some polls, but not necessary for all. And we do seem to get a decent response rate without it, so I don't stress about it. But it has been requested before by users, and would have been useful in the above request, which is why it was mentioned. I agree that there are plenty of free external poll services that can easily do that (such as the free meeting scheduler, doodle, mentioned above).

But apart from the lack of multiple selections thing, and feeling bad about not being able to fulfil OylerD's request, I am fine with the current poll system. It is simple but gets the job done.

I do agree with everything you said about people's playing times being dynamic, which is why I suggested using a forum thread where everyone only had one post that they edited to say either 'online' or 'offline' as their day evolved as a potential solution. It would be work for those who volunteered to take part (as would need to take a minute to edit their post when things came up in their day) but for the couple of days it ran, anyone else could quickly scan all the online/offline responses and see if the player they are visiting is currently playing the game or not, A separate thread to track what they see versus the online/offline status in the experiement thread might reveal some information (but might not if problem is a cross-server thing or if server response was slow).