Epiphany comments on Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong

79 Post author: jimrandomh 19 September 2012 04:19PM

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Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 06:23:48AM *  10 points [-]

Oooh great idea. Bugs / Suggestions:

  1. The answers are transformed into this tiny little poll code with a poll id, so I assume it's being saved to a database. However, the questions are not being saved with them. I can edit my question after the poll has been answered. This may result in some pranks later where you ask some obvious question like "does the earth revolve around the sun" or whatever and everyone answers "yes" and then you can change your question to "are you a Scientologist?" and you will see everyone's votes saying "yes" to that. Much more malicious changes are possible, of course. Also, if the questions aren't stored in the database with the answers, you won't have as many options later for doing cool things with your database full of polls.

  2. The code: [Poll] does not work because it's upper case, but this is not an obvious reason for poll failure, so one may end up wasting lots of time trying to figure it out or make annoying requests for support. Making this case insensitive is probably a good idea.

  3. The poll seems designed for very short answers. My elitism poll results look bad for that reason.

Comment author: Kindly 20 September 2012 10:00:12PM 3 points [-]

The poll seems designed for very short answers.

Feature, not bug.