Forum:Retiring the monthly poll

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For several months (for over a year, if memory serves correctly) I've been "in charge" of the monthly poll feature on the main page. The poll often gets upwards of a thousand votes every month, which is by any measure a pretty successful thing. However, coming up with poll questions every month is notoriously hard, especially considering the nature of polling allows you to include only a few possible responses. Additionally, while getting 1000+ people to vote is a cool thing, it doesn't do much to stimulate actual activity from those people which, really, is the purpose of featured content and main page content in the first place.

All this is a way of me suggesting that we stop doing monthly polls, and instead adopt a "monthly question" feature. We've had things like this in the past - a user writes a blog post where they provide an initial prompt and ask an open-ended question, then other users leave comments in response to the question and in response to other comments. Some of these questions have been pretty successful at spurring interaction, which is an improvement over an anonymous click-and-vote poll, in my opinion.

I know that there's the concept of boldness, but I believe that this sort of change should probably be accepted by the community before it's implemented. This is especially true because I doubt that I alone will be able to come up with a question to ask every single month.

What does everyone think of this idea? -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 00:31, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

Yeah. I personally find it more rewarding to see hundreds of good comments on a blog rather than hundreds of mere votes. I'm for it. Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 00:38, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

The benefit of this system is that voters (ahem, commenters) are able to dive deeper in their explanation as to why they chose the option, and it allows them to have a rant, talk to other people, and get to know those that picked the same option as them. The problem with this is that some voters like the poll because it keeps them anonymous. Nobody knows who voted for that option - we only know how many people did. And secondly... we gotta keep an eye on the comments, because the last thing we need is to make it look like the YouTube comments for a veery controversial video. K6ka (talk | contribs) 01:24, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

The questions we've asked in the past have been pretty uncontroversial, asking for individual opinions. We've had very few issues with users giving unacceptable comments. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 01:29, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

I didn't even know there was a monthly poll... I think that blog suggestion is a much better idea. I tend to avoid polls personally, because I like to explain why I like/don't like/chose the option. WayfinderOwl (talk) 01:34, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

The poll is on the Main Page, located along the right-hand side. If you're on a device with a small screen or on a mobile device, it appears near the bottom. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 01:39, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

This seems to be a pretty fair deal. A blog where we can all discuss our answers is better than a simple answer poll. I'm all for it too. Beds ^{(parlare - da leggere)} 15:49, April 3, 2014 (UTC)

Since the idea of creating a monthly featured "question blog" seems to be getting traction, I wanted to introduce another idea. We're trying to encourage editor participation in answering the question, but it would also be great to be able to highlight some of the more unique, insightful or intelligent comments that we receive once we start asking these questions. So, I'd like to suggest that we implement a system of "upvoting" comments.

My thought is that we can create a template (perhaps call it {{Upvote}}). If an editor makes a comment responding to a blog post we make, another user can reply to that comment and add the {{Upvote}} tag, which we would then count and tally at the end of the month. After this, we would take the top 1-3 comments and display them on the next month's blog, as a list of popular replies to the previous month's question. We could even keep a running tally of users' upvotes, and give awards to users whose comments receive a large number of votes in a month. The purpose of the upvoting system here is to encourage editors to not only contribute, but to contribute meaningfully and intelligently, to come up with new and original ideas and responses to questions, and to perhaps even spark a discussion.

+ 1 Upvote

To start, I've made a preliminary upvote template design, visible above. Let me know what you think of the idea or the design. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 03:19, April 9, 2014 (UTC)

I like this idea. I've been waiting for a like button/template for ages.

Back to the replacing the monthly poll idea. It is very hard to come up with a "open" question every week. I can't really see it going on for to long. Some may just want to say something and leave it. I think we should do a trial run for this idea and see how far that gets us. StartUp Page for talk 04:06, April 9, 2014 (UTC)  

A blog isn't a bad idea, but I don't think it's necessarily a substitute for the monthly poll. The poll is an easy one stop feature, and there's no reason for anyone not to vote anyway, unless they don't know we have this feature. If the reason to stop the poll feature is because we're short in idea, eventually we'll run out of idea for the monthly blog. Of course I'm being pessimistic and could be 100% wrong, and I didn't say finding a good idea for a poll is easy, but maybe we should consider that it's not a really strong reason to stop the poll feature.

The blog is good, I guess. Maybe we could create some more opinion blogs before we call it a "featured content"? It has good potential, seeing how people have participated in the previous opinion blogs. I didn't see if it would work as a routine activity, though. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 16:42, April 11, 2014 (UTC)

While there is a chance that we will eventually run out of questions to ask in a monthly questions feature, the fact of the matter is it's more difficult to come up with good poll questions, because you also have to supply a good series of answers. That limits the questions you're able to ask because the question can't be so abstract that it requires more than 3-5 options for answering it. The questions we'd be able to ask in a monthly questions feature can be much more in-depth and abstract because we're not limited to a few answer options.

The monthly poll takes up real estate on the main page which needs to be opened up if we want to have the monthly question there. The alternative to that is to find somewhere else on the main page to host either the question or the poll, but I don't envy the person that tries to get that to fit in with the current layout of the page. We could change the layout, but that's getting into another discussion entirely. Ultimately, the best solution is to put the monthly question where the poll appears now, and we can't do that without suspending the poll feature.

Having both a voting poll and a discussion question is redundant. The poll and question are both intended to spark interaction and possibly draw people into participating on the wiki. As noted already, the poll doesn't do a great job of this because of the anonymous voting, lack of comments, and limited number of available answers. The monthly question is built around spurring conversations and ideas, and on encouraging users to get involved.

As a final point, I don't see the poll continuing for much longer if we don't choose to stop it now. It's becoming very difficult to come up with questions to ask. So unless someone wants to take over updating the feature, replacing it with something that is easier to manage and better at encouraging interaction just seems like an easy choice to me. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 01:52, April 12, 2014 (UTC)

I guess I can now see the point that having the blog without eliminating the poll would be redundant... Personally I like the quick anonymous poll because it's easy and you don't need to get involved much, but I guess community involvement should be considered too. I'm in favor for the monthly question blog. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 06:13, April 12, 2014 (UTC)

It might be useful if we could include a template in every blog post that gives instructions to voters commenters, telling them about the {{Upvote}} template, and to highlight what is permitted in the comments and what is not. That way new editors don't have to be ingenious about trying to make their own +1 UpVote template.

I'm assuming the previous monthly poll entries will be archived as a piece of TSW History? --k6ka (talk | contribs) 11:33, April 12, 2014 (UTC)

My thinking is that each monthly question blog would follow roughly the same format. The exact details of the format can be worked out on-the-fly, but my plan would be to include an explanation of the upvote system, and include a copy-paste code for upvoting. And yes, the old polls will remain at The Sims Wiki:Polls even if the feature is suspended. - LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 20:28, April 12, 2014 (UTC)

I like the upvote idea. Making people feel rewarded for their opinion seems nice. Although, non-regular users might be overwhelmed because they're not familiar with a system like this. Hopefully in the future, regular users are not the only ones who'll use this. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 14:27, April 19, 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps, instead of Upvote, we could make it a... "PlumbBob", maybe? Just to make it more appropriate to the Sims theme of the wiki. Your's truly,
WikiBuilder1147, Supreme Commander of Infinite Histories and a friendly, normal user pretty much everywhere else ;) 14:53, April 19, 2014 (UTC)

I like that idea. - LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 20:56, April 19, 2014 (UTC)

┌───────────────────┘

+ 1 Upvote

I like it too. "A PlumbBob for your answer". --k6ka (talk | contribs) 21:24, April 19, 2014 (UTC)

Alright, here's the new upvote/plumbbob design:

+ 1 PlumbBob

-- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 22:39, April 20, 2014 (UTC)

I'm all for it.

+ 1 Upvote

Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 22:49, May 31, 2014 (UTC)

I'm voting for it too :D (If it's not too late lol)

+ 1 PlumbBob

Yours truly,
WikiBuilder1147, Supreme Commander of Infinite Histories and a friendly, normal user pretty much everywhere else ;) 22:50, June 5, 2014 (UTC)

Conclusion

The monthly poll feature has been taken down and replaced with The Sims Wiki:Monthly Question, which has been up and running. Closing this thread. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 13:23, June 7, 2014 (UTC)