Community Close-Poll Control

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Community Close-Poll Control

Area:
polls, communities

Summary:
Community admins should have the power to open and close all polls in their communities.

Description:
Community admins don't have any control over whether any given poll in the community remains open after its period of relevance is over, nor whether a user closes a poll prematurely.

It would be nice to give admins the ability to close a poll, and maybe even re-open a closed one.

I'm a little more dubious about that last, because an open poll can barrage someone with notifications, and it could be an obnoxious move to force a poll to remain open. But then, someone could delete their entry or edit it to remove the poll, and an orphaned poll can't be voted in, if I recall my poll anatomy right.

I cannot count the number of times that I have wanted to close out-of-date polls in communities I administrate, when the polls were posted by former maintainers who aren't really even in communication anymore. I could always delete the entry, but that's really overkill, even though people still can vote in something that's no longer relevant.

This really only applies to polls that are in some way dated or tied to the person who created them. "Which style should be featured in January '10" is going to be irrelevant before February '10 hits. "Change your vote if you want to be put into or taken out of the custom group that can tag this comm" (psst, yes, you can create custom groups for comms and use them to control tag permissions, both here and elsewhere) is tied to the admin who created the poll. "Who is best, Kirk, Spock, Picard, Riker, Darth Vader, Yoda, Batman, Crichton, or Mr. Rodgers?" is not likely to change in relevance or have its ties to a particular person become a problem.

Poll #1711 Community Close-Poll Control

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
17 (60.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (17.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (3.6%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (14.3%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (3.6%)

Comments

[msilverstar]

The power to close the the poll makes sense. But as OP says, re-opening is lots more complex.

[rho]

I voted "other". What I actually meant was "Picard, just slightly over Yoda".

[aveleh]

I think admins should be able to close, only the poster can re-open.

If an admin wants to permanently close, they'll just have to delete :)

[afuna]

Voted with changes:

close, yes.
open, no.

[triadruid]

This. I can't really fathom many reasons for re-opening polls that aren't drama-inducing.

[jassanja]

-1

For a dated poll an admin should create themself

Giving admins power over all polls in a community could lead to abuse as they could close down every poll that has results that go a way they don't like, when by deleting the post they would need to explain themself

[azurelunatic]

The scenario I'm hoping to prevent is when an admin that you thought would be around forever posts a poll, doesn't close it (for reasons that were perfectly reasonable at the time, given that they were going to be around forever), and then quits, disappears off the face of the internet, and/or dies, in such a way to make contacting them to ask them to close their poll impossible or impossibly awkward.

A notification that a poll has been closed sent to its creator would do well for accountability reasons, I think. And how would admins be more accountable for entry deletion than they would be for poll closure?

[jassanja]

I guess I don't see a problem in an out-of-date poll
If the post clearly says that it is for something "in November 2009" and people vote in January 2020, then it is their problem for not being able to understand what they read

And how would admins be more accountable for entry deletion than they would be for poll closure?

I guess I had a run-in with a bit of a bad mod once.
She decided to delete polls she didn't like the resutls, and since that happend fearly often people started to notice, that a lot of perfectly on-topic and within community rules posts were vanishing, ans said mod had to face questions.

If it is just a closed poll that will be less noticeable.
Perhaps if there was a visible note to a poll closed by an mod... and the mod would have to give a reason why the poll was closed ...
So if it is actually a vote about something that isn't time restricted, and there was a note that the admind closed it due to it being "outdated" just a few hours after the post was made

[azurelunatic]

The actual scenarios that I've run into have been worded a little more open-endedly, but I didn't want to make my description of the problem too much all about me.

I do most of the day-to-day gruntwork at suggestions. We've had a number of maintainers over the years, and some of them have put up polls like "what would you like to see us tackle over the next few months" and "what feedback would you like to give us". The chances that some random person with a low level of reading comprehension is going to stumble in are pretty high, despite the fairly straightforward 'this is old stuff' tagging, the fact that none of those maintainer names are even members of the community anymore, and the way that one couldn't even close polls at the time those maintainers left. It would rely less on them being able to comprehend a date that's clearly in the poll, and more on them noticing when the entry was posted, and in a high-traffic community when people are coming in all crazy-like from everywhere, I have very little faith in them actually grasping that this is out of date and can no longer be relied upon, nor do I have faith in their ability to read the profile. (And all this sounds like I have a very low opinion of random people, which is not quite how I mean it -- I know that many, many of the random people are very smart and know how LJ works and will never cause me problems. It's that portion of the random people who are the lowest common denominator and will then proceed to make themselves into my problems that I am worried about.)

[triadruid]

Hrm. Maybe a "last vote placed YYYYMMDD" note on (old) polls?

I actually agree with the general suggestion, but polls in general could use a LOT of work.

[azurelunatic]

(And that's all very LJ-centric, but I'd like DW admins to not run into the same problems that I've run into, and I can always hope that if this happens over here, then the capability will be uptaken by LJ.)