Polls and limitations

For a long time, I thought that the maximum number of poll options that vBulletin itself would allow was twenty. Admittedly, there's no particular reason for such a number to be a ceiling -- more likely, that number would be a power of two -- but I thought we were given that limitation because of vBulletin.

However, I was wrong, as I found out when Kishi edited the "Pointless poll :)" in the FFI-IV forum to make it more complete. I've never counted the exact number of options in any of Kishi's edits (they also include "Best Character Story" in the FFVI forum and "Best game ever" in the General Squaresoft forum), but there are certainly more than twenty of them in each of those polls. I'm guessing they number in the sixties.

My question is: Why the upper limit for those who aren't moderators or administrators? A large number of future polls could be much more complete if that ceiling were removed, and I'm sure that would anger far fewer people. I know how provoking it is not to see my favourite option on a list and thus be forced to vote "Other." Yes, some people might abuse the privilege, but the moderators could certainly just eliminate spam polls with an unnecessarily large unmber of choices, and I think it would be easier for them to go about deleting unnecessary polls than being asked to fix the huge number of incomplete polls that are currently... well... incomplete. Which happens right now.

Also, while we're on the subject, I understand the purpose behind not allowing non-moderators to edit existing poll options (they could change those options so that their favourite was winning, which would be bad), but is there truly any reason for not allowing us peons to add to our old polls?

Just wondering.

Peace
The Man

I think the 20 is there to stop people messing about and posting ridiculously large polls. I've seen some with well over 100 before (not at these boards :p ), asking what your favourite ASCII symbol is xD

Besides, with polls that large, the results are virtually meaningless because you're never going to get enough votes such that it makes sense, there aren't usully that many people who'll vote in the first place :)



As far as I can see, I can't see any option to allow a user/non-mod or admin to edit their own poll, it seems to be a mod function only - but I'm still new to VB so might have missed something :p

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Originally posted by crono_logical
I think the 20 is there to stop people messing about and posting ridiculously large polls. I've seen some with well over 100 before (not at these boards :p ), asking what your favourite ASCII symbol is xD

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Polls like that could be deleted, of course. I still think it would be nice, for example, to be able to make a poll with all the songs in the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack asking which of them was a user's favourite, but right now I'd have to ask a moderator before I could be allowed to make such a poll. Perhaps it should be only enabled in the gaming fora -- can't realistically see a poll in General Chat with 64 options being anything but spam, actually.

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Besides, with polls that large, the results are virtually meaningless because you're never going to get enough votes such that it makes sense, there aren't usully that many people who'll vote in the first place :)

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True, there aren't. But it's always hard to know what people are going to vote for. And if one person really likes, say, KluYa, I'm sure they'd feel really good voting for him in the poll. Completeness is always nice -- lots of people don't care enough when they vote "Other" to explain.

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As far as I can see, I can't see any option to allow a user/non-mod or admin to edit their own poll, it seems to be a mod function only - but I'm still new to VB so might have missed something :p

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Blarg. It would be nice if we could add more options to our polls after the fact, but if it's impossible with vB as it is, then don't worry about it.

Peace
The Man

A poll with more than ten options sucks. *nods*