Feedback on this new DEV feature?
Tags: meta, changelog
Published: 2019-06-15 22:39:22

<h2><mark>🚨 Polls are not a functional feature on DEV/Forem. This post purely represents a proof of concept.</mark></h2>

***

### Here is a thread I made earlier today:

{% link https://dev.to/ben/do-you-code-on-the-weekend-how-often-what-s-your-routine-like-4h00 %}

### And before getting into what I've been up to this weekend:

{% link https://dev.to/ben/its-perfectly-fine-to-only-code-at-work-dont-let-anyone-tell-you-otherwise--25i3 %}


### My other answer:

I've been using this weekend to ship some ideas which haven't found their way into the weekday priority bin for me or the rest of the team. Low pressure time to hack on anything I want is my favorite part of the job.

One such feature I just pushed and would love some feedback on:

# **Polls!**

{% poll 1 %}

Before you get too excited, this feature currently only works for admins, and even for admins, you can't actually _create_ a poll outside of the console.

I'm a stickler for maintaining usefulness and accuracy with polls and surveys, even if these aren't necessarily for _scientific_ use. As such, I think we'll want to collectively come up with good rules around whether articles that contain polls are allowed to be edited after they are published (probably not, right?) and things like that.

We will also want to come up with a good interface for including polls in posts. Two approaches come to mind.

## First create the poll in separate UI and then drop in to a post like this:

```markdown
{% poll e41 %}
```

## Define the poll entirely inline:

```
{% poll %}
How do you pronounce dev.to?
- dev dot tee oh
- dev dot too
- dev dot toe
- dev toodilydoo
- dev too
{% endpoll %}
```

{% poll 2 %}

The poll functionality should be extensible for creation of surveys and other neat things. I think it could be fun and very useful for the industry if we get this right. I also think it would be cool if we created some aggregate data analysis of polling trends as folks use the feature which could be anonymized and released for analysis. It could be a fluid way to help people make better choices about the software they build. Before doing that we'd want to be very clear about how the data would be used and offer simple opt-out options for having your votes included in this kind of aggregation.

I'm not sure when this will ship for general use, but feel free to hop into [our repo](https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to) and improve on anything here. Since this was mostly a weekends feature I'm releasing it as a bit of a surprise, so the rest of the DEV team may be finding out about it via this post. 😄

Polls currently accept up to 15 options and allow for use of some inline markdown tags like the `code` element. Option count is pretty arbitrary but maybe we can hammer out all the little details while it is in closed beta. Multi-option polls also seem like a good idea. I left the schema flexible enough to build towards that idea but did not implement it in this push.

Here is a poll that could have been included in the above-mentioned thread about coding on the weekend:

{% poll 3 %}

## P.S.

Speaking of new things... If you check out the "three dots" menu in the post "reactions" area, you can see new notification settings which allow you to subscribe to comment threads. This will be useful for keeping up to date with interesting discussions, AMAs, etc. depending on the post.

We think folks will find a lot of value in that usage pattern. We want to ship some additional tooling for providing more context within the notification page before we make a big announcement/push about this feature. But as long as you're reading this little weekend announcement I felt like I'd let you in on that as well.

If you follow along in the repo, you might have already known about all of this stuff already.

Happy coding!