We have just posted some sizable internal upgrades, which should speed up the site and improve Internet Explorer compatibility. (For those techies among you, we’ve migrated our Javascript from mootools to jquery.) If all goes well, it should be largely invisible to most of you, but if you notice any problems please post them on our forum.
Thanks to the terrific service AddThis, you can now easily share polls with your friends through Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and dozens of other ways. At the bottom of any poll page (before or after voting), you will see a new set of sharing icons:
Just click one of the icons on the left or select “More Sharing” to see other sharing methods. Spread your favorite polls around and share the fun!
If you enjoy Mister Poll, this is your chance to influence the poll directory. We are in need of a few more poll reviewers! No pressure or quotas; just review as much as you are comfortable doing. You’ll get free uncensored and ad-free access, as well as a nifty little badge displayed by your name. You must be at least 18 years old and must agree to our reviewing guidelines.
If you are interested, email me at misterpoll@misterpoll.com!
Due to your requests, we’ve decided to start experimenting with Facebook a bit. As a way of dipping our toe in the water, we’ve created an official Mister Poll page on Facebook. Check it out and become a fan today!
We are proud to unveil our new watch feature tonight! You can now create automated watches to monitor your favorite areas of the Mister Poll web site. You will be notified by email about any new activity in those areas. You can watch:
- All of your polls for new votes
- All of your forums for new messages
- Any individual forum for new messages
- Any topic for new messages
- Any directory category for new polls
- Any keyword search for new polls
- Any user for new polls they’ve created
- Any user for new messages they’ve posted
You will need a free Mister Poll account to create a watch. Look for watch links throughout the web site. They look something like this:
Watch a Directory Category
Create watches for all of your favorites, so you’ll never miss the action again!
You people create a lot of polls, which is great! However, it does make it difficult at times to keep up with the reviewing process, as I’m sure some of you have noticed. We’d like to reliably turn reviews around within 24 hours, but with our measly 2 reviewers, we just don’t seem able to keep up that pace while still doing everything else we need to do.
A couple of months ago, we had our first volunteer poll reviewer. She was terrific, and things were really going smoothly. We were lucky to find somebody so responsible and effective right out of the gate. Unfortunately, she has to attend to other things right now, so she’s not currently able to keep reviewing.
So, we are now looking for a few new volunteers who are interested in reviewing polls. Think of the fun! It’s an exclusive club. You’ll get to see new polls before anybody else and decide their fate. You’ll also get a snazzy little “poll reviewer” badge in your user profile.
Because this will give you access to un-reviewed polls, some of which will be adult in nature, we have a few volunteer requirements:
- You must be at least 18 years old
- You must agree to responsibly adhere to our reviewing rules
Ok, technically that was a couple of requirements rather than a few. I will send our reviewing rules to you after you contact me.
So, interested? If so, send an email to me at misterpoll@misterpoll.com.
UPDATE: We had a great response to this post, and we have all of the volunteers we need at the moment. If you’d like to be notified when another spot opens up, go ahead and email.
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!
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!
The Life and Times of Mister Poll 