Polls in Scoop can be made to appear on the mainpage (which also makes them appear in all of the section summary pages as well) or attached to stories. Any way you make a poll, it will be editable through the Poll admin tools, of which there are two, just like with Stories. The first is the New Poll tool, which allows you to create a new poll, or edit a current one (if you get there from the Poll List tool), and the Poll List tool, which gives you a list of all of the current polls, and their status.
To edit or create a new poll, you have to have the edit_polls permission, unless its an attached poll and you have the attach_poll permission. Creating polls in the New Poll admin tool is pretty self explanitory. The top two buttons allow you to save or delete a poll. Below that is a line that says the status of the poll, when it was last updated. If the poll is attached to a story it will also have a link to that story. Below this is the poll question, it can have any characters in it, but no html. HTML is not allowed in polls in scoop, because of odd formatting problems. You are by default allowed 10 answers for a poll, but this is a configurable number (of course :). The var to control this is poll_num_ans, and it is in the Polls section of the Site Controls.
So fill each text input area in the answers with your answer, and click save. If you don't want to allow the poll to run with the winds of fate, however, you can change the var allow_ballot_stuffing to true (or checked) and administrators will be able to set the amount of votes each poll answer has received. Users will never be allowed to change the number of votes for each option, unless they have perm edit_polls from the Group admin tool.
This is the same form that appears below the Submit Story form if the user submitting the story has the attach_poll permission.
The main way to get at a poll is to go through the Poll List admin tool. You need the list_polls permission to get to this menu. It is designed after the Story List (3.2) tool, so you should see many similarities. There are 4 columns to this display:
Title: | This is the title of the poll, and the number that the poll was posted on the site counting reverse cronographically. After the title is the number of votes on that poll so far, and a link to vote on that poll. If you have already voted that link will take you to the poll answers. |
Date: | This is the date the poll was last updated. |
Action: | (unlabled) This is an action you can take on this poll. If the poll is attached to a story, you can unattach it from that story by clicking (unattach). If the poll is not attached to a story and not on the main page, you will have a (make main) link, to post it as the main poll on the site. And if the poll is the main one on the site, you can click on (Remove from main) to have no poll on the main page. |
Delete: | This column just contains links to delete the poll. Just click on (delete) and the poll will be out of your life forever... |
Don't take the results obtained from any online poll too seriously, people tend not to be the most honest in online polls. Of course, your site could be different :)
We have taken some precautions to make sure people don't vote twice on polls too. People with accounts can only vote once. Each ip can only vote once as well. That means that if you have a group of anonymous users behind the same firewall, only one of them can vote.
Allow different groups to vote on polls with the permission poll_vote. You also have almost as much control as you do with sections with regard to who can post or read comments. Using the permissions poll_post_comments, poll_read_comments, and view_polls you can control who can post or read comments in a poll, or who can view any polls. Though you cannot control whether they are hidden or denied the permission, as you can with sections. They will merely be hidden.
Everything in the Polls category in Site Controls (3.5).
edit_polls, list_polls, attach_poll, poll_vote, poll_post_comments, poll_read_comments, view_polls