Friday 10 February 2012

Who owns a Sea Kayak News poll?

When working up the new facility on the Sea Kayak News page that allows members to present a poll of options to the community for their votes we had to make some decisions about ownership. The problem arose while we were working on the facility to edit a news post. Normally the edit function would be used to correct typos in the title or web site URL. In parallel with the ability to edit a comment (available for all comments created by any user) the new ability to edit a poll potentially made it possible for the person that posed the poll to change the results after other members had voted.

We decided that the originator owned the poll overall and had the right to edit the title and to delete the poll if they felt they wanted to. However we also decided to restrict the poll’s originator from deleting or changing the text of an option that had attracted one or more votes. The idea being that votes belong to the voters and not the pollster. Clearly, there will be occasions where a poll originator will want to clarify a poll option even after it has attracted some votes – we feel that this can be handled by adding text to the available section above the poll options that allows for additional details.

A feature of the page that allows Sea Kayak Wales members to post a poll is a checkbox that (when checked) will automatically add an option to the poll with the text “Other (please leave a comment)”. This is a deliberate ploy to encourage pollsters to keep their poll open. I, for one,  am often frustrated by polls that do not allow for my opinion or circumstance in the options available. Now, should that checkbox default to be checked or unchecked?

So – now you can poll our sea kayaking members on just about any relevant topic which is a nice extension to the option to ask questions that had already been added to this dedicated social bookmarking facility.