Polling users

[misaochan]

As @domdomegg suggests at #442 , it might be a good idea to poll users on big changes (especially UI/stylistic changes) that we plan to make. Checklist for this issue:

• Decide if a polling option is worth the extra work (I vote yes)
• Decide how to implement - AFAIK Google Groups forums does not have a poll option. I wonder if it might be worth switching to a phpbb-powered forum (which would be more user-friendly in addition to allowing polls), but then there is hosting to consider. @neslihanturan , as our moderator, what are your thoughts on moderating a phpbb-style forum instead of a google groups forum?
• Decide how to inform users - a one-time in-app alert?

[domdomegg]

In regards to implementation, perhaps it could be done on Github as a thumbs up / thumbs down or using Wikipedia Commons talk pages as other votes are done there.

[tobias47n9e]

+1 for polls
0 I don't think we are enough people to make a bulletin board look active.
+1 for opening an issue for a "What's new, what has changed" sort of dialog window

[maskaravivek]

Again +1 for polls. I agree with @domdomegg's suggestion of using github itself for polling purpose.

If from one time alerts we are planning to send gcm pushes then i would like to give a -1 vote to it. More often than not users are irritated with any notification that they explicitly opted for.

[misaochan]

Okay, so step 1 is done. :)

The problem with using GitHub for polling, IMO, is that the vast majority of our users are non-techies and thus probably do not have GitHub accounts. Possibly a larger % of them would read Commons talk pages, so I would be more inclined towards that compared to GitHub. Is an embedded option within the app feasible? I've never tried, but I assume we would need a server to host the polls and the implementation would take quite a lot of work.

@tobias47n9e what do you think about using the website for polling?

[tobias47n9e]

@misaochan Definitely a nice idea to do it within the app. Have never seen that being used anywhere before. It would not be to difficult to set up a small web service for that. Maybe someone at one of the hackathons can work on that. Otherwise I can tackle that after the web stuff for image requests and campaigns is done.

[nicolas-raoul]

How about just creating a straw poll with some online service such as strawpoll.com and announcing it on Twitter?
We would first need a Twitter account (@misaochan would you find creating one?), that can be linked to from the About dialog.

[chrisdebian]

I wonder whether this is still an issue? I thought the 'up-voting' in GitHub was a really good idea, and it also made me think of the 'Discussions' functionality in GitHub; then, misaochan pointed out that many / most of our user-base probably have no idea what GitHub is, never mind have an account.

Chris.

[nicolas-raoul]

most of our user-base probably have no idea what GitHub is

Any volunteer to post relevant +1 comments when feedback is received on our feedback wiki page? 🙂 Not a perfect solution but better than nothing.