Quick Tutorial: Polls!

Happy spring and fall forum users (depending on where you are)!

Today, I feel like I really need to stress the importance of polls and they can be extremely helpful to you in your posts. First off though, the basics (then later, we’ll talk about where you can incorporate polls)!


Basics

#1 Build a poll:

#2 Options (a LOT):

TYPE

Single Choice:
SingleChoice
Note: Single choice has CIRCLE bubbles.

Multiple Choice:


Note: Multiple choice has SQUARE bubbles.

Number Rating:

RESULTS

Always Visible — even if someone doesn’t vote, they can see the results of the poll

On Vote — only after voting can a person view the results (but they can go back and change it)

When Closed — after the poll closes (no longer accepting new votes), only then can everyone see the results

ALLOWED GROUPS


In the drop-down, choose up to ONE group to have the poll open to (i.e. choose builders and only people who are in the @Builders group can vote).

CHART TYPE


Note: It’s a little better to use a pie chart because it’s all in one place and you can visually see the proportion better than the bar. Plus, if you have a lot of options, the bar chart will go off-screen and you’ll have to scroll to view all the results, whereas the results are all in one place in pie charts.

SHOW WHO VOTED and AUTOMATICALLY CLOSE POLL


Show who voted — it will display the people who voted what choice (how we usually see them elsewhere in the forum); please only set this if absolutely necessary because polls are for honest answers, and you won’t gather them if people afraid of others seeing their choice(s)

Automatically close poll — if you check this, a calendar will appear and you can choose a date at which the poll will automatically close and no one can vote anymore

Alternatives

After you insert your poll, you will see something like this (it will be different and be based on how you configured your poll):


You can edit the words here (i.e. change “regular” to “multiple” to get a multiple-choice poll)

Number of Voters and Votes

“Vote Now!”, “Show Vote”, and “Close” Buttons


Note: the “Vote now!” button will be blue when on the choices screen, it’s gray right now because I was on the results screen


Application

Great, we know what polls are, but where and when do we use them?

Categories

You can use polls in almost any category. What I like to do with any tutorials I create is put a rating poll and a did-you-learn-anything-new poll to gather data and evaluate my topics (trust me, just scroll down, you’ll see one :wink:). I also like to have polls in discussion threads to see what others’ viewpoints are on a particular topic. If you love statistics (like I do), you will love polls!

The only place where it’s best not to add them are feature requests and bug report threads. Basically, if your post is in any sub-category of #platform-feedback, do not add a poll. The sub-categories include (click to expand):

Hashtag Galore!

#platform-feedback:engine-features
#platform-feedback:engine-bugs
#platform-feedback:studio-features
#platform-feedback:studio-bugs
#platform-feedback:website-features
#platform-feedback:website-bugs
#platform-feedback:mobile-features
#platform-feedback:mobile-bugs
#platform-feedback:xbox-features
#platform-feedback:xbox-bugs
#platform-feedback:developer-hub

The reason being that this category is viewed by Roblox engineers, and polls are quite distracting when time is of utter essence to them (currently, about 80 topics are created in this category in a week and there only so many Roblox staff members). So, it’s best to keep your posts as terse as possible and one way to do that is NOT adding polls.


If you have anything to add, please feel free to reply!

I told you above, I love polls, so of course, here is one:

Rate this tutorial.

  • 1
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0 voters

Did you learn anything new?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Thank you very much for your time and feedback,
Have a great spring / autumn!

11 Likes

Shouldn’t this be in resources>community tutorials?
Otherwise: nice tutorial.

2 Likes

This is about the forum, so no I don’t think so.

3 Likes

My bad, thanks for correcting me

2 Likes

I’m in serious doubt whether this should be clarified about if this should be in #resources:community-tutorials rather than #forum-feedback itself. The primary reason is the information topic that includes what purpose the category poses. However, #forum-feedback is only for technical suggestions, bugs and feedback on the forum. It does not mention anything about tutorials, perhaps you should change it to #resources:community-tutorials anyways.

For your information, read this: About the Forum Help category

5 Likes

The community tutorials topic specifically says tutorials about development. This doesn’t belong in here any more than forum feedback. I’ve seen forum related tutorials moved to #bulletin-board before, although I’m not really sure if that’s where they belong either.

Direct quote:

Topics that are not about (Roblox) development should probably go into a different forum category, …

Regardless, this tutorial hardly seems necessary. All of the options on the poll are right there, and are pretty self-explanatory.

5 Likes

Maybe a change should be done then? Okay, back to #forum-feedback, but it is difficult to determine because it’s in the middle ground.

On a second thought, there was a bot on Discourse that actually showed you a tutorial through all its basic functions. Might not be necessary, redundant.

3 Likes

Yeah, I have no clue. I’ve seen forum related tutorials moved to bulletin board, but that obviously doesn’t mean it’s the best place.

4 Likes