Time and time again you see people stating their opinion on an idea. I think it would be nice if we could start our thread with a poll, so that people vote if they support it or not. It would make going through comments a lot easier.

Mmm... I kinda like this, but on the other hand, you can already like the post to show that you support the suggestion? If you're going by a poll (or post likes) alone to see the support/no support votes for your suggestion, you are going to miss a lot of good feedback people may have left on the topic.

I wouldn't mind just having polls in general on the forums, but this does feel kind of redundant with the option to like a post to show support without posting.

Little nugget of Subeta history: iirc the really old suggestion center (way way way before we had the suggestion forums) had a support/no support system where you had to give reasons why you support/don't support it. That... was also really clunky and exhausting to use and deal with and most of the suggestions there just sat and never got touched by anyone, users or staff. :')

Just because something didn't work before (in the old era) doesn't means it can work now! Specially with so many people who is dedicated to the craft of keeping Subeta high quality enough to read and analyze people's suggestions!

I think the main issues with the "liking" post system we have at the moment are: 1- There is only like, no dislike way. 2- It doesn't really stands out. 3- It's a bit easy to ignore, and it's per post. Not only for the original post/thread

Something exclusive for suggestion thread creations wouldn't be so bad. Seeing how the suggestion forum works as of now (people suggest and others agree/disagree), we could use this as a nice tool to start debates and proper discussions about an idea.

Maybe we could even mark people's post to show the ones who support an idea and the ones who don't all over the discussion of this idea. But that's me getting far too ahead of myself, lol.

I would like something along these lines. The heart post button is flawed in that you can't unheart it later, if you change your mind, you can't use it on mobile at all, and there is no way to show dislike.

Sometimes you can tell how people feel about this by comparing both the likes of the OP and the top dissenter, but not always.

Also, a simple poll attached to all suggestion threads could have a third option. It wouldn't just be yes/no. It could be:

• Yes, this is a great idea. Let's do it!
• No, I don't think this would work really well.
• I like this idea, BUT...

That would give us a cursory idea of what people think of it, and then the comments underneath could discuss it further if they so choose.

Just because a suggestion is popular and heavily supported doesn't mean it's a good auggestion :(

That's true. That's why qualified people should vote against something

No support.

Subeta's suggestions forum is not a democracy, an exercise in trollage, or a source for psych student testing.

@ iara Thing is, none of us are really "qualified" for voting on a suggestion. What would we even use to gauge why someone's feedback and vote is more worthy than someone else's? Post length? Account age? Number of posts? None of those guarantee that the voter is qualified. Having requirements would exclude a lot of people from giving feedback. You don't want that when the forums are already really slow and inactive. What if your "qualifications" get revoked? I mean, I've supported suggestions that the majority disapproved of, and I've disagreed with suggestions that the majority approved of. Would I still be qualified to give feedback on suggestions even though I've said something on some topic on a day when my brain wasn't blasting on all cylinders?

I can give feedback on your idea, you can give feedback back to me for my response, we can both agree that a particular idea is fantastic and needs to happen ASAP! But ultimately it's up to staff.

You don't need a poll to start discussing an idea. You do need a bit of knowledge about the mechanics of the suggestion and the site.

All that aside, I can still see polls being problems, both in S&I and in general.

Someone makes a suggestion topic. Not many people reply because we're mostly recluses who can't be bothered, or we just don't have time. Most of the people vote in the poll instead. Poll votes don't bump the topic up to keep it easily visible, so their topic falls off the first page. If you make poll votes bump the topic up, then polls can also readily be used to bump topics up in other forums.

Same example as above, only that the poll has overwhelmingly negative votes. The execution of the idea in the first post has changed, however, because the poster listened to feedback. But they can't change or reset the poll. If polls are editable or resettable, you'll have no accurate gauge for the new idea. People can't change their votes unless a poll is reset, and it's kinda rare that people hang around a particular suggestion topic and follow the conversation after they gave their two cents on it.

And, of course, if you have a ton of friends, you can always ask them to skew the poll results in your favor.

Adding a dislike button to go with the like button would likely have poor results; there are always users who aren't too loved by the community so there would likely be dogpiling on the dislike button for their posts. You wouldn't know why someone dislikes your post or who dislikes your post, you'd just see the number of dislikes rising and that's really discouraging. Makes a person feel like shit and quickly puts them in the "well why should I bother improving or changing if nobody even likes what I have to say?" mindset.

I'd rather have the post likes fixed instead. Let people unlike posts, and let people on mobile like things. I can't tell you the number of times I've been browsing on my phone, saw a post I approved of, but I couldn't give it a heart. :/

Honestly, I think that a poll might encourage witch hunting and take away some more nuanced discussions if used in the suggestions forum or the site feedback forum.

That said, polls might be a nice/usefull feature for all comercial, funny, artsy or social subforums, as long as it comes with a no brigading rule that maybe doesn't allow anyone but the poster of the poll to ping people to vote in the poll (possibly just in any commerce forum, this might not matter so mutch in the chit-chat forum). For example so a CW creator can call on their ping group to vote between different CW designs but so no user can call all their friends to vote for one specific design the user really likes (and presumably not all the friends have intrest in buying), discrediting those users who have genuine interest in another option.

I'm still fairly new, but I didn't thought the "witch-hunting" problem was as dangerous as you two put it. Why, so far every person I have seen this in game has been delightful. But then again, I'm not too active on all boards so there's no way for me to know if personal disagreements and vendettas are as extreme as you put it. All I can do is take your word for it, and hope I don't find such issues in my time.

Obviously this is not a "suggestions with tons of votes MUST be applied". It's just a way to measure how popular a suggestion is. Ultimately, it's the devs and programmers who decide if something sticks or not.

It's just one of those things that happens online, sadly. :/ People have taken disagreements and vendettas too far in the past. No community is perfect, online or otherwise, but I do hope that your stay here is enjoyable! BUTYEAH, back on topic!

I'm still kind of undecided about polls. They would be super useful for artists, CW makers, and just for silly, fun, harmless topics in general (pancakes or waffles, anyone?), like said. But on the other hand, there are offsite resources for that (strawpoll for example).

It would depend on how much the users would want user-made polls in general, not strictly ones tied to the S&I forum, and on how customizable the polls would be. If you have to make a new topic every time you want to start a new poll (it was this way in the super old forums), that would just get really annoying. ._.

Maybe pay a small handful of sP to reset a poll? Or limit poll resets to once every X days? I think that would work for topics that genuinely want input from their followers, like in the case of CW designs.

Possibly an ability to allow users, or groups of users to vote in a poll? Checkboxes or something. For example, if you're polling for an art design and you have a ping group for your stuff, you can set that group to have voting permissions, then ping them yourself as necessary. Ditto with friends, or allowing all users to vote.

Lately there have been some threads in the site feedback that got out of hand and had to be closed. for example: Major Drills and Carl both squick me out. Now I would not say that this happens extremely often, but sadly it does happen, especially when people feel very passionately about something. Since controversial subjects within the site rules (e.g. close this npc shop) still need to be able to be discussed, Ways to discus this should ideally be so people can not just come in and vote yes/no/option 3 on the subject but be forced to write out their opinion and hopefully in that proces think about what is being said and about what they themselves are trying to say in a respectfull constructive manner that adds to the conversation.

On a more positive note, on discussion forums even a slight idea someone posted instead of just liking the first post, can spark some amazing brainstorm sessions.

That thread is just... Woow. But even in such chaos, you manage to learn useful stuff. I didn't know Custom CSS was a thing, for example! And now I can use that to browse. It goes to show that even threads that get out of hand have something for everyone if you are willing to put up with them. I guess maybe a poll option when creating a thread would suffice. Most discussion forums have those, don't they? It would be yet another toll to make threads. And it's not about a tool being bad, but the potential uses and abuses people can give them.

Honestly, polls on itself are not a bad idea, and you are right most discussion forums do have polls. It will depend on if the admins think the effort to build a polling option into the forums is worth the effort, possibly with the features came up with and possibly with new forum rules forbidding brigading (as I currently can not find such a rule). Also the whole "does a poll stifle creative answers" thing I am not entirely shure of myself (In the current system, if a post already exist expressing a opposing opinion of the threads creator you can just like that post instead of posting).