Help:Poll

You can add simple polls to your community using simple syntax.

Standard polls do not properly function on the mercury mobile skin, other alternative extensions such as Polldaddy or PollSnack are available to service mobile users instead.

Step by step

 * Open the source editor.
 * Find the place on the page where you want to add a poll.
 * Copy the following code and edit it as needed:

 Title of poll Choice 1 Choice 2 etc.


 * For example, here is a customized poll:

 What Is Your Favorite Color? Red Green Blue Other


 * Save the page. Now anyone can vote in your poll! The end result:

What Is Your Favorite Color? Red Green Blue Other

How does it work?
Votes are registered under either your username or if you're not logged in, your IP address. This means the poll does not take a reliable count of unique individuals and it should not be used for important purposes.

Users can change their vote at any time.

The poll will display the number and percentage of votes for each choice, the total number of votes given so far, and the date and time when the poll was created.

Identical polls posted in different places on your site will act as different data entry points for the same poll. If multiple polls are desired, each instance must differ somehow in their source code.

Can the votes be reset?
It is not possible to end, i.e. to 'freeze', a poll. All polls last indefinitely.

To reset all votes, change either the title or one of the poll's choices (which will, in effect, create a new poll).

Since it's so easy to change and reset polls, past poll results can easily be lost. Reverting to the version prior to the reset may allow you to reclaim the information, but you should not rely on this functionality. If historical polls are important to you, it is safest to record the results in some other form such as a screenshot or simply text.

Customization options
It is possible to customize the design of the poll extension via CSS.

Changing the width of the poll
By default, polls are 40em wide. Admins can change a poll's width using the following CSS:

div.ajax-poll { width:auto !important; }

This will need to be added to the community's CSS file (see Help:Community CSS and JS). It will make all polls as wide as the "box" they're in, i.e. they'll usually expand to be as wide as the article body. You can now set its width by wrapping it in a div with a set width, a table cell, or in any other layout box. For example:

How wide is this poll? Wide Not so wide Sort of wide

The end result:

How wide is this poll? Wide Not so wide Sort of wide

Further help and feedback
ca:Ajuda:Enquestes de:Hilfe:Umfragen es:Ayuda:Encuestas fi:Ohje:Kysely fr:Aide:Sondages it:Aiuto:Sondaggi ja:ヘルプ:投票 ko:도움말:설문조사 pl:Pomoc:Ankiety pt:Ajuda:Enquete ru:Справка:Голосование vi:Trợ giúp:Bảng bỏ phiếu zh:Help:投票