Poll editing

#1

So, I fell victim to the nightmarish “can’t edit polls after five minutes” error message in this thread.

Whenever you set up a poll, in theory the system gives you five minutes to edit it. Presumably, this is the case so you can only fix minor issues like typos as soon as you posted it and not let the poll maker make it seem like people have said things they wouldn’t say, for example, set up a poll option “I don’t do drugs”, wait for people to vote and change that option to “I do drugs” a day later.

But the message says “[…] after the first five minutes.” and it’s not clear what those first five minutes are. Five minutes after the poll creation? Five minutes after the first vote? In my case, I made the thread but didn’t initially think about adding polls, so I added them later, definitely five minutes after making the thread. When I realized I made a mistake I tried correcting the poll options well before five minutes after the polls creation and the first vote have passed, but to no avail, the system only gave the error message you can see above. Then I tried deleting the polls to make room for another two polls and got this:

So I can only conclude those five minutes take into consideration the time the post was made, not the time the poll was created or the time the first vote was cast. Which is weird, as it implies that polls built on a post at least five minutes old can never be edited.

This poll editing debacle has been a thing since the beginning of the forums and, even though the error message says you can call a moderator to edit poll options, I remember hearing that not even the mods can do something about it. Can you confirm, @moderators? If in doubt, please feel free to try and edit the first poll in the thread I linked, there’s a typo in the second poll option, “unlcoker” should be “unlocker”.

I can somewhat understand not allowing us to edit polls for the reasons I stated before, but then why can we edit quotes? I can make someone look like they said anything I wanted by editing quotes, like this:

Even thought I never said that on the forums. But I cannot understand why we’re not allowed to delete our own polls, after all if I don’t want anyone to see the statistics I collected, I should be able to delete it. Of course, unless flagged, just like with normal posts.

Anyway, is there something that can be done about this? Or is it something that I should posted on the Discourse forums?

#2

I think I heard it mentioned that as soon as any vote is cast, it locks the poll.

So if that is true, it might be that the error message just isn’t giving the full info:
"…after the first 5 minutes, or after any vote is cast…"
might be the situation that occurred to block your edit.

I imagine the core reason why we can’t delete the whole poll is to avoid people hiding polls after they ask something hoping for one response, getting a different result, and then trying to bury it by deleting the whole thing in rage/shame/etc, so I’m okay with it needing mod intervention, and might be worth to (re)state that the mods are a higher authority than TL5-leaders, and might be they have the capability to edit poll option wordings.

#3

It’s possile. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with Discourse, nothing we here can do to change that error message.

I think I remember one the mods saying not even they can edit polls after those infamous five minutes.

#4

No one can touch polls once it’s been 5 minutes or there are vote in them.

(Might only be if there’s votes in them)

#5

Polls are a known weird issue with the forum software. In large part the restrictions have to do with how data is stored, from my understanding. Directing you to a moderator to fix doesn’t seem to bypass this technical problem, so I have no idea why it says that. I’ve been blocked from editing before, too.

Five minutes or till a vote is cast is my answer. Do people not validate, double check, and ponder on their poll choices so often that this problem is always coming up?

#6

If one vote is enough to screw things up and often the poll maker votes first, it’s no wonder it happens a lot. In my example, I already knew what I was going to vote for even before clicking the “create topic” button.

Just to be sure, there’s nothing you mods can do about the issue, right? Nothing like changing a forum option to allow people to at least delete polls?

#7

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.