Polls

[Rich-Harris]

If I'm the maintainer of a project, and I want to solicit feedback on a feature idea or API change or whatever, GitHub issues are a good way to start the discussion. But after a while the thread often becomes unwieldy and off-topic, and it's hard to figure out what the community actually wants, and given the fact that '+1' is often frowned upon, you only get feedback from people who feel comfortable formulating an argument and putting their head above the parapet.

Polls would be a great way to solve this problem - if, within a comment, I could create a list of options that contributors could select from, we'd be able to form a much clearer picture of which decision the community favoured, and it wouldn't prevent the discussion from taking place alongside it. (I'd probably suggest that votes should be public.)

[Rich-Harris]

Email response from GH:

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll certainly pass it along to the team. I can't promise if/when we might implement polls, however your feedback has definitely been recorded.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

Cheers,
Jamie

[cirosantilli]

Comment upvotes would be a half solution for this, but would also help other use case, and simpler to implement: #209 , the downside is that it does not allow parallel conversation.

Another more versatile possibility: voted comment trees like Discuss or Redit, which also allow some parallel conversation: etiquette fix top level comments to be answers, and discuss below.

[dobkeratops]

I would really like up votes for Comments and Issues. An option to sort issues by votes would achieve some of what polling could.

When I emailed them , I was told "we prefer real participation" - but, on the contrary, IMO it would keep the quality of participation higher.

• You wouldn't need to repeat a point,
• you would have a way of registering an opinion quantitatively
• It would encourage users to read more of whats' been posted already
• it could be used as a means of prioritising feature requests