Polls?

[+Insp Gadget]

OK, I give up. How does one make a poll? Everytime I try it gives me an error.....

[+Prime Suspect]

OK, I give up. How does one make a poll? Everytime I try it gives me an error.....

I think it's been turned off, and I hope for good. It was probably the most annoying part of the old board. The vast majority of them were utterly pointless.

[Jeremy]

We decided not to turn on polling in the new forums.

[+Doc-Dean]

I think it's been turned off, and I hope for good. It was probably the most annoying part of the old board. The vast majority of them were utterly pointless.

And because of this, the quality of all the other posts and threads has improved??!?

 

 

[+Halden]

Thank you indeed. I find on most boards polls just turn into stupid debates about underwear colour or the price of tea in China.

[+Jamie Z]

We decided not to turn on polling in the new forums.

Thank you.

 

Jamie

[+Hemlock]

Jeremy,

I'm sure you don't want to edit the canned software to make it stop showing the button, but how about replacing the image of the button with a 1x1 transparent gif. That will get rid of the illusion that the feature is there.

[Pantalaimon]

I find it interesting that there is no small yet vocal minority demanding the return of polls. Apparently we all agree that the abscence of polls is an improvement.

 

Amazing.

Edited December 11, 2003 by Pantalaimon

[+The Leprechauns]

Add me to the ranks of folks who don't miss polls one little bit. It wasn't the poll answers that were helpful, but rather the posts by those with differing views on the poll topic. We can still have the discussions without the polls. I also don't miss the posts which say "there's a mandate for such and such a change because a poll on this subject had a 70% vote in favor of it." On a good day, 100 people would vote in a poll. There's no way to know whether that's representative of the views of geocachers generally. Or how many of those votes were duplicates from sock puppet accounts.

 

What I miss the LEAST are the poorly constructed poll questions. A good political survey firm can construct a poll with the questions worded in such a way to "shade" responders to answer in a certain way; i.e., to prove the desired answer. The majority of poll creators in the old forums weren't anywhere near as sophisticated. I'm glad I no longer have to read through polls that sound like the following:

 

"I think X would be a great idea for geocaching. Anyone who can't see the merits of X is a jerk. So, I thought I'd start a poll to see what everyone thinks.

 

Poll Question:

Do you agree that X would be the absolute best thing ever to happen on the geocaching.com website, even though there is no chance that Jeremy would ever listen to us and actually do something about X?

 

A: Yes, I agree, because X would be really helpful to me.

B: Yes, I strongly agree, I've been asking for X for a very long time and I'm tired of waiting around for it.

C: Yes, I agree sort of, it is not the most important thing but X would be nice.

D: No, I am a mindless clone and will do whatever Jeremy wants."

[+MrPeabody]

Thank you indeed. I find on most boards polls just turn into stupid debates about underwear colour or the price of tea in China.

Blue!

 

$1.32!

[+Team GPSaxophone]

We can still have the discussions without the polls.

Are you sure?

[+Navdog]

Thanks Jeremy, I know this is not a poll, but I will vote for no polls.

[+Stunod]

OK, I give up. How does one make a poll? Everytime I try it gives me an error.....

I think you need a Mommy Poll and a Daddy Poll. From there I get confused.

 

Most of the polls were pretty silly anyway. You can still ask how people feel instead of funneling their opinions into the predetermined answers that the polls had.

[+Eric K]

To a larger degree that is one of the things that have always bugged me about polls on large websites like CNN or some other place.

 

Polls on websites are so misleading. If a big webiste has a poll on a story that you aren't interested in only people that are reading the story will reply. Therefore it is not a scientific cross section. That's kind of like having a poll on the Coca-Cola site asking, do you prefer A. Coke or B. Pepsi. Well it's not like Pepsi users will most likely be going to the Coke website.

 

Rant done, just one of my personal pet peeves.

Edited December 11, 2003 by Eric K