(no subject)

[ewx]

LJ has a polls feature, but:

• only paid users can make polls
• only LJ users can fill in the polls
• you can't edit polls after creating them, even just to fix typos
• the kinds of things you can ask is constrained
• the output is pants

So it would be nice to have a website that allowed essentially anybody to create and fill in polls.

My thoughts so far as to what you might want from such a thing.

(Now updated, lest it appear that the people commenting below are asking for things that are already there.)

Comments

[kake]

textareas as well as input type="text" please.

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Notification when someone has filled in a poll is also something that is lacking in LJ polls.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's a good one.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

LJ are, I believe, working on polls you can edit..

[megamole.livejournal.com]

you could be naughty with iframes, perhaps.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

IFRAME can't be used in livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=14), unfortunately. It might work for other blogs but lj is kind of the core constituency of this proposed project...

I read that lynx at least lets you get at the content of frames (inline and otherwise) which reduces objections concerning text only browsers.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

The thing that annoys me most about LJ polls is that you can't say "how did X answer the poll", only "how was this question answered". I keep thinking of polls I'd like to write but which would only be useful if you could correlate the answers in some way (50% of people who answered yes to question 1 also picked option button 3 on question 2).

Also, having the layout
[question]
   [tickybox]
   [tickybox]
   [tickybox]
is quite constraining; I'd like something like
               [column1] [column2] [column3]
[question 1] [tickybox] [tickybox] [tickybox]
[question 2] [tickybox] [tickybox] [tickybox]
[question 3] [tickybox] [tickybox] [tickybox]
or similar.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That'd be good. I wonder how the results would best be presented?

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

I wonder how the results would best be presented?

Ah, I was leaving that as an exercise for the reader :-)

(IOW: I don't know. It would be difficult to come with somethign that would be acceptable to everyone. Perhaps some option to show correlations between answers to small sets of questions graphically?)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

One of the basic ideas is that the results will be readily available in machine readable form. So whatever limits are built in, you'd be able to do your own processing of the results too.

[gerald_duck]

Allow correlations to be shown between responses.

Allow numeric values to be entered in a text box, as an alternative to LJ's method (a line of radio boxes).