Tonight’s release brings the much-requested feature of paged search results. This means you can now dig deeper, beyond the initial 50 results. It may seem like a minor thing, but for some people, it was a major irritation to be limited to the first 50 hits. It could be especially frustrating if you were looking for an older poll. In any case, this is no longer a problem, so enjoy!
Archive for the 'Mister Poll 2.0' Category
We have always tried to weed out inappropriate content at Mister Poll. Despite our efforts, more and more questionable polls and messages have been creeping in. Mostly, it’s the messages. There are just too many postings for us to keep up with them all ourselves. We do sometimes get helpful emails from you, pointing out a message or poll that really needs to be removed. Thank you for that. We jump on those as quickly as we can.
Lately though, it’s just not enough. We’ve been quite alarmed at some of the things we’ve found recently. We’ve seen examples of people encouraging child abuse and molestation, trading child pornography, and enticing under-aged kids to email privately in order to trade sexual stories and/or pictures.
This has to stop.
We simply will not stand by and allow Mister Poll to become a home for online predators and other dangerous deviants. Healthy discussions about consensual adult sex is one thing, but these have gone far beyond that. I know this will be an ongoing battle, but we’re making some changes that I think will help.
The first step we’ve taken is to make it much easier for you to notify us about any inappropriate content that you find. Every poll and every message now has a Flag link. Whenever you see something that you feel should be removed, please click this link. It will automatically notify us of the content, so we can review it for removal.
We have a few more changes in the works as well, but I think this first one is the most important. The more people we have looking out for dangerous situations, the more effective we will be in fighting them. If you have other suggestions about how to clean things up, please do let us know.
Thank you!
A few weeks ago, we quietly added user profiles to the Mister Poll web site. Some of you may have noticed that user names are now clickable throughout the site. The profiles themselves are not too fancy, since we don’t ask very many questions about you when you create an account. The really useful part is that you can see a list of polls the user has created as well as the messages they have posted. As an example, take a look at my profile page:
http://www.misterpoll.com/users/mister%20poll
As you can see, I don’t create many polls myself, but I do post a lot of messages.
If you look at your own profile, you may see that not all of your polls are listed. For most visitors, your public profile only shows polls that have been submitted and approved for the Mister Poll directory or search engine. Similarly, it only shows messages you have posted on polls meeting the same criteria. This is done for the same purpose that we have the review process in the first place — To keep kids and the more conservative adults from stumbling upon mature content.
If you happen to be logged into an account with uncensored access, you will see even more when viewing a user’s profile. Any polls that have been classified as adult will also be included, as will any messages posted on such polls. The only items excluded will be polls that either have not been submitted for review, which the author presumably wants to keep private, or polls that our reviewers have rejected as entirely inappropriate, broken, etc.
That’s all for our initial version of user profiles. We’ll likely expand them a bit in the future, and we’d love to hear what additions you’d like to see. Post your ideas as comments to this article or over in the official Mister Poll forum. Keep in mind we’re not looking to build the next MySpace or Facebook here. This should mainly help you find other content created by your fellow users, stay connected with them, etc.
I can finally say it. Mister Poll 2.0 has launched! We made it through more than a year of sporadic development and two months of open beta, and it’s finally here. Wow. I’m sure this feels much more profound to me than it does to you, but there were times I wondered if it would ever be finished. Quite a few times. It’s nice to get this much needed sense of relief and accomplishment.
Thanks to those of you who helped us test during the beta period. Your efforts definitely made this a better release. A great thanks to all of you who have used Mister Poll over the last 10 years! You make this site possible, and your suggestions are what shaped this new beginning.
I have more release details to wrap up before I can sleep, so I’ll keep this post brief. Explore the new web site and have fun discovering what’s new. Nearly everything is improved in some way. The whole thing was rewritten from the ground up, so the changes are far more than skin deep. Some of the previous blog posts mention a few details, and I’ll do my best to cover more in the near future.
In the meantime, here’s to another 10 years!
Oh man, it feels good to say that. At long last, I am proud to announce that the beta of our new Mister Poll web site is now online! It’s taken so much longer than I had initially hoped, but I’m quite happy with the end result. The real question is, will you be?
Before I send you over there, let me say a few quick words about this beta. First, it’s a beta, so there will likely be a few imperfections. Hopefully nothing major is still lurking out there, but if you do find something, please let us know. Also, don’t limit your comments to things that break. If something feels awkward, doesn’t make sense, or you simply have a suggestion on how to improve it, speak up. We want to hear about that too.
Also, this beta site is running completely separate from the live Mister Poll site. Nothing you do on the beta will effect the live site in any way, and vice versa. This includes making new polls, changing existing polls, voting, posting messages, changing your password, etc. The two sites are completely separate. The beta site was seeded with a copy of the data from the live site as of early morning October 1st, 2007. When beta ends and we launch for real, we’ll start over and the latest live data will be re-converted one final time.
As far as what’s new, in a nutshell: a lot! In addition to the snazzy new look, almost every feature is improved in some way. I will post additional articles talking about the new features in more detail, but for now, go explore!
I’d really appreciate any feedback.
Thanks! I hope you like it!
I’m looking for a few advanced pollsters who would be interested in shaping how our upcoming results export feature will function. The export is how you will gain access to all of the individual votes rather than just the summary data. Presumably this will be mostly of interest to data geeks who want to sift through it to find cross-question associations such as, “How did people who voted for option B in question 1 end up voting in question 5?”
I’m a programmer and database person, so if I were going to crunch a bunch of data, I would probably want to load it into a database and run queries against it. One of our export options will likely be geared toward being loaded into a relational database. This is right up my alley, so I don’t expect much difficulty with that option. However, I know there are a lot of you who would much prefer to use a spreadsheet of some kind. I can use Excel, but I am no advanced spreadsheet guru. I’m having trouble guessing just what somebody would want to do with these results in a spreadsheet, and how the data should best be arranged to let them accomplish that.
So, if having access to all of the voting details in a spreadsheet sounds like your cup of tea, please speak up in the comments on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you would use the data, especially within Excel. Once I get a good grasp on that, I’ll work on a proposed spreadsheet format to support your goals. When I have a sample ready, I’ll ask for your feedback on that as well.
Thanks!
Remember that Mister Poll 2.0 project I mentioned eons ago? I’ve finally been making real progress on the development again the last few months, and we’re truly closing in on completion. For the web site, I’m down to my final 8 tasks. Woo hoo! We’ll still have to do internal testing after that, but we’re getting quite close.
It’s been a long and demanding road, but it feels good to finally have the end in sight.
I’m not setting a date yet, but I thought you might like a bit of good news after the long drought.
I’m pleased to offer you a glimpse of the future today with a few screen shots from our upcoming major web site upgrade. This has been a long time coming, and those of you who have heard me mention it in the past have probably begun to doubt whether it’s real. Well, it has really been coming together lately, so I thought I’d share some visuals to give you a taste of things to come.
Click any screen shot to see a larger view.
Making a Poll
I’m sure the first thing you’ll notice is the dramatic face lift. Yes, Mister Poll has had a lot of work done. 
In addition to the haircut and new eyes, the web site itself has been redesigned from the ground up. After trying out many different colors schemes, we decided to stick with something based on blue. We really tried to focus on readability and ease of use. I hope you like the new look and feel. I know I do.
There are so many improvements to polls that it would be difficult to list them all today. Instead of only multiple choice questions, you’ll be able to choose from several question types such as fill-in-the-blank, essay, rating, ranking, etc. Through the magic of AJAX, you will add and edit questions in-place without ever leaving this page. Questions can be required or optional. A single poll can be deployed separately to different sets of people, resulting in separate sets of data. You can set begin and end dates. You may also notice that “Move Questions” link near the top. More on that in the next screen shot.
Moving Questions
Technically this is still part of editing a poll, but so many people have asked for this feature over the years, I thought it deserved its own screen shot. At any time, you can edit your poll and move the questions around. Not everybody has their entire poll planned out ahead of time. Frequently as you’re building it, you will think of a new question. In the past, your only choice was to add it to the end of the poll, and that may not be the best place for it. You may also decide that your existing questions work better in a different order. That’s fine too. In the new web site, you can drag and drop your questions into any order you please. Look closely at the screen shot, and you can see that I had just begun to drag the first question to a new location.
Viewing Results
The simplest view of your poll results will still be the familiar graph. However, I thought you might be interested in seeing that those have been given a face lift too. The results section is still being actively worked on, and you can see that we haven’t quite decided how (or if) to show a graph for some question types, like fill-in-the-blank or essay. If you have any thoughts on that, feel free to leave a comment. You will also be able to download result details, including the actual answers that each individual voter submitted. You could then do even more advanced reporting with external tools such as Excel. If you’re a techie programmer type, you could also load them into your own database and do just about anything you like.
Yes, as that big black rectangle on the right indicates, the public side of the web site will still show ads. (We have to make some money to keep the doors open here.) We will still offer our “Ad Free” subscription for those who want to kill the ads for themselves. Plus, for a fee, you’ll also be able to make sure your poll is always shown ad-free to everybody. We’re also planning some other premium extras. How much? Well, we haven’t finalized all of the pricing yet.
When?!
That is your next question, right? Because Mister Poll is only a part-time venture, project timelines are very difficult to predict. This project has been tackled in bits and pieces over the last year, and while great progress has been made, there is still a good deal left to do. We are getting close, and the pieces are really starting to come together. Those screen shots are not mock-ups. They are actual screen shots of a functioning system, taken from Mozilla FireFox on Mac OS X.
Please feel free to add your comments, questions, and suggestions to this blog entry. I hope you like what you’ve seen here. This is just a small part of the changes this upgrade will bring. I’ll post more updates as the project progresses.
