Visitors shouldn't be able to vote in polls

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#1

Visitors shouldn’t be able to vote in polls.

For many obvious reasons;

  • Visitors cannot explain their vote
  • People can raid polls by asking ‘their’ visitors to vote
  • Everything else is read-only to them; polls must have been an oversight
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#2

What kind of polls are you posting that you don’t want visitors to be able to vote on?

#3

Every poll. The nature of the poll is irrelevant.
They’re posted on the devforum to track the consensus of devforum members.
Much like how threads are posted on the devforum to have devforum members discuss in them.

#4

I’m not sure others would agree with you. It’s up to the OP whether or not they’d like visitors to vote on their poll. The most important categories for private polls (development discussion, inception, developer surveys) are already private, and polls really aren’t useful in the public categories (e.g. Feature Requests and Bug Reports as “would you like this done or not” has no bearing on whether something will be implemented/fixed).

This also isn’t possible with Discourse, so there’s no point in asking.

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#5

First of all, it is entirely possible to restrict polls to certain trust levels only.

Your idea of what constitutes the usefulness of a poll is wrong. A poll isn’t useful when its result can be used for something. A poll is useful for getting its result.
Whether the poll is useful for getting a result or not depends on the nature of the poll; obviously the question and possible answers but also the participants. The nature of the latter is what I’m arguing for here.

Let’s say, and this is entirely hypothetical and unrelated to ongoing threads, that I want to steal old usernames, or, whatever, get free robux.

In an attempt to make my argument more convincing, I start a poll and instruct fans or followers (via various social media or chat platforms) to vote. An unrepresentative consensus is met: its participants are not devforum members. However, the topic is discussed exclusively by devforum members in the thread. This will confuse people into thinking the participants of the poll are exclusively devforum members also.

Then, why even have polls if they are useless for getting meaningful results about the people actually discussing the topic?

#6

That poll would be useless though.
Features aren’t implemented based on polls. Game development isn’t a democracy.

I agree that visitors shouldn’t be able to use polls but there’s no real downside either since polls bear little to no weight.

#7

It’s really up to the person running the pole whether or not it bears any weight or not.

I know plenty of people will actually take the poll results as a legit response to what they were asking and go with them.

#8

Hi everyone,

Here’s a list of all of the categories on the Developer Forum that are visible to the public:

If you wish for Visitors to not have access to polls, we recommend that you post your poll in either of the “Development Discussion” or “Lounge” categories as these categories are not accessible to the public.

At this current time, Discourse does not have an option to disable poll-voting from particular trust levels. Rest assured though, if Discourse do provide this feature, we will utilise it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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