Suggestion How to make a Poll

[ArchonFarseerGuy]

Subceeding a *looks around* certain poll in the General Hobby Discussion forum, I thought a few pointers may help. Staffers, feel free to delete, edit, poke, electrocute etc wherever you deem appropriate.

NB: This does come with wisdom dripped onto it, watching others errors, and of course, mine. Yes, even the greatest of use make mistakes (if ever I wanted to kill myself, I could just jump off my ego).

1) Find your question. A poll is generally what you run if you have a question to which you think the answer will be a little vague, hard to keep track of etc, or if you just want a flat, definitive answer. For example, if you want to conduct a fully scientific investigation into what the most common (well, scond most common, the most common really is a given) 40K army is, then you may decide a thread is too hard to keep track of, so you can place a Poll in there.

2) Keep a broad range of options. I have been guilty of this one tbh. With your question, think OF EVERY POSSIBLE answer. if you check the SI forum, you'll see one of my later polls. That thread was me deciding whether to use Phoenxes or battleships, yet there are about 7 options there.

You can use up to 30 options. I suggest you take advantage of this. If you run out of ideas, put an "Other" option there. So now you know. If I ever see another poll without the option "Other", I will pull out the Angry Hammer, and you do not want that.

3) INCLUDE A CLOSING DATE!!!!! Out of every poll I have seen, about 1/4 (and I'm being generous here) have a closing date. I'm sure there are some Nehek cultists out there that specifically go round looking for dead threads with a poll featuring no closing date, only so they can raise it from the dead.

Ideally, a thread will have passed its prime after around 21 days. That's when all the people who actually care about the poll will have voted. Everyone else could be a Nehek cultist.

4) Multiple-choice polls. Use them if you feel a person can legitamitely provide more than one answer. What colour undercoat you use can have one answer prioved to it. What 40K army you collect can have more than one, so make it multi-choice. This is a very basic one. If you screw this up once, it could be put down to human error. If you see someone screw this one up 6 times, refer them to this thread.

5) Public polls. Personally, I don't see why they're even here. They can be interesting, but to date I haven't seen a situation where making them public has made a huge difference, barring a sweepstake of some kind etc.

Now students, thus endeth the lecture. You can see me after class to give me money, post feedback etc.

-AFG//