To create a poll on this forum, use a [poll] tag, then create a list of items in the post.
[poll]
- Option A
- Option B
- Option C
[/poll]
The author has a “Close Poll” button which locks voting.
There are a ton more nifty poll features available. You can read all about them there.
EDIT: This feature was totally revamped. When that happened, all existing polls broke. 
LMK if anything of value was lost.
In hindsight, I guess I could have used this for the GOTY polls I just made, but range voting will probably yield a better result in this case; forum polls only allow you vote for one thing.
This is why we have a two party system! For the sake of freedom @sam_saffron, you must allow us multiselect in our polls! Okay, enough of that, but seriously while I expect Preferential voting to be a bit complex for Discourse implementation, at the very least Approval voting is a mark better than a simple Plurality, right? (Yes, yes, I know, it’s a matter of being lower priority than other Discourse features, but, a man can dream, right?)
When I tried to do this, it keeps saying “Body must contain a list of poll options.”
Here’s what I have:
"Poll: Who is your favorite character from Trial of the Demon Hunter - Volume One of Demons Among Men?
1.)Beckham the boggart
2.)Emira the goblin
3.)Hildred the fortune teller
4.)Illucio the warlock assassin
5.)Illusia the witch assassin
6.)Venefira the witch assassin
7.)Hestia the witch assassin
8.)Lord Sarrivan the vampire"
The syntax is the same as that used by the bulleted list (maybe numbered list too, IDK), and to my understanding it only works in the first post of a thread (copy/pasta the actual syntax of Dan’s post):
To create a poll on this forum, put "Poll: " in the subject line, then create a list of items in the post.
- Yes, I knew about this, but I was keeping it a secret.
- I knew about this, and I thought everyone else did, too.
- No, I had no idea.It has to be a bullet list, not a numbered list. Test it out on http://try.discourse.org/
Thanks! I got it to work.
Options for non-anonymous and multi-vote polls would make this much cooler.
Or am I missing those somewhere?
Yeah, I really want multi-votes.
Multis select would be a huge can of worms 
Conceptually it gives people who pick more, more power, which is not really desirable.
A preferential polling system is desired for “moderator elections” but is a very big edge case and a very big piece of work.
There are a ton of different possible strategies for multi-voting and I don’t see how you could satisfy everybody.
But @sam_saffron, FWIW, I think it would not be a bug farm to add score voting (“range voting”) in particular, where everybody rates the options on a scale from 1 to 10 (or leaves an option “unrated”), and then reports the average. It’s a simple voting system that’s surprisingly well liked by voting geeks. http://rangevoting.org/
That’s what I wound up using for our GOTY polls. What's the best Choice of Game in 2014?
Yeah, eventually ranked voting can be added to the poll plugin, not against that. Though the algorithm for doing it right is not easy.
@sam_saffron Score voting is a much simpler algorithm. Ranked voting can get arbitrarily complicated, and may be better for serious elections, but in score voting, everybody just rates everything on a scale from 1 to 10 (or leaves it blank if they don’t want to rate something), and then an average score is shown for each contestant.
Whether or not it gives people who pick more - more power - is rather irrelevant is it not?
If the author of the poll wants people to be able to multi-vote, why shouldn’t the option be provided?
Those who don’t like it don’t have to use it.
I think it would be most useful to have “{poll}{/poll}” tags, with the list inside them. That way one can create several polls in one topic. I currently would like to start a poll in one of my topics, but I don’t want it to be in the main post… And it would be improper to start a whole new topic for it…
Well, it turns out that the Discourse team heard our cries and totally revamped the polls feature.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-better-poll-feature/28008
Unfortunately, all existing polls were broken during the revamp.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/existing-polls-broken-by-recent-revamp/27883
LMK if anything of value was lost during this transition.
Polls seem to still be broken. Does something have to be done to get them all working again?
Yeah they’ve been broken for a while.
@Dfabulich @jasonstevanhill Anything either of you can do to fix things, or is it ask Discourse?
We’re on it. Thanks, FairyG.
Finding that the polls have been fixed you:
Celebrate
0 voters