Great features ! Thanks and congrats to those who made it happen.
One suggestion : you can't see the result until you voted, I guess it's not to bias/anchor the answer, but then it would be nice to add an option "I don't plan to vote, let me see the results", so someone who doesn't want to vote for any reason can still access the outcome. Or else, there is a risk of people not wanting to vote but wanting to see the outcome will vote "at random" and skew the result.
In the meantime, the effect can be simulated by proper selection of options. Example:
Which is your favourite superhero? [pollid:37]
Excluding the ponies (which I didn't vote on, because I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet), this is the earliest radio poll where the sum of the numbers in the column matches the "Total" number at the bottom.
because I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet
I am glad that you used the word "yet": accepting the possibility of getting better is an essential part of overcoming a problem.
Minimize the expected square of the distance between your answer and 80% of the mean of the answers chosen: [pollid:8]
I see a 'Total 123' but the table and chart only show 2 votes. The raw data also have 123 entries.
I would like a user preference that makes it possible to vote non-anonymously by default. But it's low priority - this is really awesome as is!
Oooh great idea. Bugs / Suggestions:
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.
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.
The poll seems designed for very short answers. My elitism poll results look bad for that reason.
BUG: The display of the data for the multiple-choice polls seems to reset at some point, though I can still see the complete raw data when clicking at them... e.g. right now, though 68 people have voted for the "best pony", at the display I only see the choice of the 68th person (Applejack) having a single vote, and all the other choices are falsely at zero.
Similar things with other polls.
The raw poll data is sent with "Content-Disposition: attachment", which causes firefox to download it instead of letting me view it in the browser. Is this deliberate?
Neat. Thanks!
This deserves karma. For fun, enter how much you think this post will get. [pollid:6]
After my vote:
" Mean 43.5 Median 75.0 Total votes 2"
Well this is mathematically impossible... My guess is the median isn't properly calculated for even numbers of votes.
Thanks for spotting this! I looked into it, and it seems to be double-counting the most recent result when computing the median. It's an order-of-initialization issue; it thinks it's getting all the results except the new one, adding it, then taking the median, but it's actually getting a list of all the results. The fix is straightforward; I'll email the admins to apply it.
No, that's unfortunate but correct (several people entered things like entered -3e+18 as their estimate).
This is the sample poll from the article (just a straight copy-paste). These aren't exciting questions, so you should ask some that are!
What is your favorite color? [pollid:2]
How long has it been your favorite color, in years? [pollid:3]
Red is a nice color [pollid:4]
Will your favorite color change? [pollid:5]
Current results: Red: 0%; Green, 33%; Blue: 67%; Other: 0%.
I'm gladdened to see that even though we don't discuss politics on LW, the green scum are in the minority here!
If you choose an answer to this question at random (using a uniform distribution), what is the probability that you will be correct? [pollid:51]
This doesn't look right: http://screencast.com/t/qpRGihBG
The raw data says there are 13 votes for "0" and 20 votes for "1".
Bug report: The right navigation bar on this page has scooted down as if it's being pushed out of alignment by something too wide in the comments section. The comments seem to have the same width as they normally do and I but perhaps the polls are interfering with the layout in some way?
FFX 15.0.1 W7
There is something wrong with the page formatting on this post (but on no others I've tried). The sidebar at the right has been shunted to the very foot of the page. The top of the sidebar overlaps the footer bar and the rst of it hangs down below the page content. I've tried this in two different browsers (Safari and Firefox on a Mac). Could the new poll formatting have interacted badly with the CSS? This doesn't happen if I load an individual comment on this page, for any of the comments I've tried.
The largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers. (45,000,000,001?)
According to my I Ching calculator, beyond 4 is a suffusion of yellow.
This appears not to be a valid response. Curious.
Minimize the expected square of the distance between your answer and 80% of the mean of the answers chosen: [pollid:9]
Awesome! But since we're stress-testing it, let's try doing things wrong.
First thing that I noticed is that it doesn't let you post if there's a poll error. That's great! ... except it doesn't respect four spaces to put something in code format, so I can't easily tell you what I tried and what failed. Putting tests in their own comments to make it more obvious when something passes.
[edit]Oops, this also floods recent comments.
Trying to do a poll with only one option fails gracefully. Example: What kind of book did you read last? [poll]{a book}
Modifying the number of periods modifies the number of options available: [pollid:12]
|poll:True............False|
One period is well-defined: Nope. |poll:True.False| throws an "invalid poll type" error.
What about leaving off one of the names? |poll:True...| throws an "invalid poll type" error as well.
How many Quality Adjusted Life Years do you estimate you have left? [pollid:43] Include whatever uploads, uplifts, descendant entities, etc. you deem to still be "you"; time spent in a deanimation vault counts as 0 QALYs.
My poll is now broken. The specific answers don't show up anymore in the results, only the totals at the bottom of each question show. Elitism Poll
Offtopic: testing strikethrough: -one-, two, three, four, five, --six--. Apparently still doesn't work.
Anyway, polls are totally awesome, thanks for implementing!
Poll test:
Red is a nice color [pollid:684]
Is there any way to embed polls into the body of an Article/Discussion post? Or does it have to be in comments?
Bug: If you write a comment responding to a comment with a poll, then vote in the poll before posting the comment, your comment is eaten.
Does this poll work? [pollid:97]
Did you enjoy this poll? [pollid:98]
What was the answer to your previous question? [pollid:99]
One common and annoying failure mode in writing polls is omitting options. This can be mitigated by including an extra "Other" option. We could make this automatic and mandatory, adding that option to all polls automatically. The upside is that people couldn't forget or decline to include the Other option when it's appropriate; the downside is that they can't adjust its wording or leave it out when the options are truly exhaustive.
Should multiple-choice polls have an Other option added automatically? [pollid:68]
If someone wrote the code to make the inclusion of an "Other" option a default, opt-out behavior of LW polls, I would not object if that code were added.
Perhaps we do need some explicit guidelines about the conduct of polls after all, beyond "don't be an asshole". Something about employing neutral point of view, not using a poll for purposes other than conducting a bona fide poll, and making a serious attempt to design it to obtain unbiased data. I had expected this to be obvious, but it seems not.
[What do you do when you notice eridu commenting on feminism?] {Ignore the comment}{read and possibly upvote or downvote}{downvote without reading}{downvote the comment and everyone who replied}
By the way, there is only one right answer to this.
If you choose an answer to this question at random (using a uniform distribution), what is the probability that you will be correct? [Poll]{25%}{50%}{0%}{25%}
Most voters so far have probably voted False to this question: [pollid:15]
I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.
This is an especially good point because you're currently able to change the question after the results are in, allowing you to prank the poll takers by making their answers seem to support anything you feel like.
I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.
What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.
Upvote this comment and downvote the karma sink if you think I should not kill myself. :-)
(Edited to add smiley per Poe's law, especially in case someone sees this comment without seeing the parent first.)
Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There's no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.
Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.
Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.
Individual responsibility. You can't legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.
You can now write Less Wrong comments that contain polls! John Simon picked up and finished some code I had written back in 2010 but never finished, and our admins Wesley Moore and Matt Fallshaw have deployed it. You can use it right now, so let's give it some testing here in this thread.
The polls work through the existing Markdown comment formatting, similar to the syntax used for links. Full documentation is in the wiki; the short version is that you can write comments like this:
What is your favorite color? [poll]{Red}{Green}{Blue}{Other}
How long has it been your favorite color, in years? [poll:number]
Red is a nice color [poll:Agree....Disagree]
Will your favorite color change? [poll:probability]
To see the results of the poll, you have to vote (you can leave questions blank if you want). The results include a link to the raw poll data, including the usernames of people who submitted votes with the "Vote anonymously" box unchecked. After you submit the comment, if you go back and edit your comment all those poll tags will have turned into [pollid:123]. You can edit the rest of the comment without resetting the poll, but you can't change the options.
It works right now, but it's also new and could be buggy. Let's give it some testing; what have you always wanted to know about Less Wrongers?