Make number of poll choices configurable

[KylePiira]

Pitch

It would be nice to be able to change the maximum number of poll choices in .env.production

Motivation

I'd like to increase the max number of choices for a poll to 5 on my server, however, that's currently not possible without forking the code.

[joenepraat]

I like to increase the maximum number of characters per option. 25 is much to low.

[connyduck]

Also, please announce the poll limits in api/v1/instance like Pleroma does it

"poll_limits":{
   "min_expiration":0,
   "max_options":20,
   "max_option_chars":200,
   "max_expiration":31536000
}

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[joenepraat]

I still like this request. Poll options length is far to short.

[domi41]

Showing interest for this so that the bot does not close it during the holidays…

This raises a federation question though : how should polls made on a server allowing more options behave on servers allowing less options ?

[trwnh]

stalebot has been disabled for issues, it was only meant to work on prs but was misconfigured iirc

[pludi]

This raises a federation question though : how should polls made on a server allowing more options behave on servers allowing less options ?

Given that Pleroma already allows more than 4 options and these get rendered just fine I don't see an issue there. AFAIK the ActivityPub standard doesn't set a limit here.

[JorgeStolfi]

See #23295.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

#10609 (comment)

AFAIK the ActivityPub standard doesn't set a limit here.

I don't think Mastodon should either. Why not just allow as many poll options as the user wants?

---

@joenepraat, I'd say that #10609 (comment) is a separate request.

[trwnh]

I don't think Mastodon should either. Why not just allow as many poll options as the user wants?

Mastodon is opinionated, so it sets limits that it thinks are reasonable and in its view will improve the experience -- 500 characters, 4 attachments, 1 poll, 4 options, and so on. However, remote posts are not bound by the same limits. Mastodon handles these remote posts differently in various cases...

• More than 500 characters will still be stored. Some clients like the official web app will collapse posts that exceed a certain height once rendered. Other clients will show the long post in its entirety. This has led to the custom of adding a CW for "long post", which is not ideal, but it is considered the courteous thing to do since more than a few clients don't support collapsing long posts. (I'd argue that this is a problem with the clients and that it should be fixed in those clients, but that's besides the point.)
• More than 4 attachments will get silently truncated. Additional attachments will not be processed, and there will be no indication that there are more attachments. (There is a separate issue filed for this.)
• More than 1 poll is not possible only due to the way polls are serialized over Mastodon's flavour of ActivityPub. Mastodon uses Create Question and treats the Question similar to a Note, in that it gets converted to a status based on its content, but it also processes the oneOf or anyOf properties to reconstruct the poll attachment. (This is something that's not really in line with ActivityStreams, where Question is an activity and not simply an object... but that ship has probably sailed, since everyone treats it as an object. If there was ever a request to have more than one poll per status, then it would probably necessitate a migration to using Create Note with Question in attachment, but this is out-of-scope for the discussion on the current issue.)
• More than 4 options will get shown just fine. This one is the most arbitrary of limits, as it's almost entirely on the authoring side within Mastodon.

I do remember a poll once that asked what your favorite fediverse software or favorite fediverse account was, out of a list of over 20 options. I think it's a bit ridiculous, but I don't really see how it's any different from collapsing longer statuses after they exceed a certain height. Just let it scroll, I guess?

Also worth noting: in Pleroma/Akkoma these are usually options configurable for local and remote. You can reject activities and objects that go beyond your set limits. Example:

[RokeJulianLockhart]

@trwnh,

More than 4 attachments will get silently truncated. Additional attachments will not be processed, and there will be no indication that there are more attachments. (There is a separate issue filed for this.)

Any idea which issue?

[trwnh]

that would be #14336

[McKristoffer]

Cannot +1 this suggestion enough, max 4 choices is definitely too small. It's a no-brainer to have this configurable on a per-instance basis.

[mitexleo]

Which files do I need to edit ?

[bantryblues]

glitch-soc already has a higher max poll options.
they’ve done it for so long they don’t even mention it anymore in their list of features.

there are also instructions on the web for how to change the max options for polls in Mastodon, but they have to redo it every time they upgrade.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/how-to-increase-the-number-of-mastodon-poll-options/

so increasing the number of options seems to be a trivial change