Ok I see the feedback here is excellent so here is my proposal for a good poll system. What follows is what I consider a poll system that has all I needed and never found anyewhere. Maybe that will be interesting for you as well.
Basically I happened to need polls for three different reasons.
1) To VOTE
2) For PROBLEM SOLVING
3) As a SURVEY to find out about what people think, and more.
Here are the options I' d like to have:
1) Option to set what user levels can add polls. Also, it would be great if you could set up a SPECIFIC single user, so that you may delegate somebody to the creation and management of polls regardless of its level.
2) When creating a poll, it should be accessible BOTH as a post in the topic/forum it was created, AND as part of a GLOBAL POLL LIST accessible from the main page.
3) When in the global list, there should be an option to view ALL polls or only CURRENT posts, that is those that have not expired yet.
4) When creating a poll, the creator should have an option to decide if the vote is secret or not.
5) When creating a poll, the creator should be able to decide if there must be an expiration date. There could be a menu like this:
EXPIRATION:..[.]Date,Time [../../...., ..:..]
.....................[.]Manual
When MANUAL is selected, the creator can decide when to manually stop a poll and get the results. This is good when you want to collect all the info you can, and don' t know how much time you have. So, when you run out of time, you go back to edit the poll and stop it. If instead the expiration date/time is set, the poll closes automatically and refuses to accept more votes.
6) The poll creator should be able to decide if voters can add options to the poll. This is a very useful, unique feature for problem solving. Suppose you have a problem. The question is: " Guys, where shall we go in vacation?" . The first voter adds an option " USA" and adds his vote on it. The second voter comes in and says " Italy" and adds his vote necxt to it. The third voter comes in and agrees with the first voters, so he does not add any option and votes for US (which has now two votes!); The forth voter comes in and adds " Viet-Nam" , and votes for it. So now we have US with 2 votes, Italy with 1, Viet-Nam with 1 too. And so on, until the end of the poll.
7) When creating a new poll, the poll creator should have an option to allow voters to change their vote before the poll is closed. This is good for problem solving, too. Back to the previous example, suppose voter three comes back and sees Viet-Nam. He may think " hey! I did not think of that! Yes, I prefer viet-nam!" So he could move his vote from US to Viet-Nam, so we would have US 1, Italy 1, VN 2. See what I mean? This until the end of the poll.
8) When creating a poll, the creator should be able to decdide whether results should be emailed to the voters.
9) When a user adds an option (if the poll is such that he can) as I said in nr 5, the forum should email all those that had already voted, so that they know a new option was added by somebody, and if they like they can update their preference (change their vote).
10) This is very refined :) : The poll creator may set a date (=a deadline) for option addition and one for vote changing. So you may have a poll like this: Poll starts today; voters can add options until July 1st; voters may change their vote until July 15th; Poll expires July 31st, which means that between July 15th and July 31st new voters can vote, but nobody can add an option, and nobody can change his vote anymore (until poll end, on July 31st).
11) Polls Should have these elements: a field for the question. A field for the " explanation / details" , where the creator explains what he means and why and so on; a list of options (as many as the creator wants), which can also be 0 if the creator wants the voters to add all the options and simply prefers to ask a question (" Where do we go in vacation?" )
Ok. I Guess this is it. I hope you like the idea
Thank You,
Taym