As an interested anonymous viewer I like to see the polls here without having to register or vote myself. Is that still possible?
Probably not. The registration process on the TimesCOD forum is part of the forum software, not something created by admin.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t register with an anonymous username (at the moment, in fact, since nobody else has chosen the username “anonymous”…) and use the profile options to NOT show e.g. email address. But you do have to vote before you can see the results – again, part of the software rather than admin choice.
I am not really eligible to vote, for reasons you may intelligently guess. In the old system I could see how the voting went — which was fun (and sometimes funny!). What has changed?
It was simply a question of time. Pete was taking care of the Blog-based poll and only gave it up because of lack of available time. I volunteered to take over, without realising that to post polls on here you have to have a paid account; not really justified.
The PhP software that runs the forum-based polls has a few more bells and whistles, but it doesn’t allow viewing of poll results without voting – I think that’s a weakness but it’s not something that can be changed.
I’m open to suggestions. I had the idea of gathering the month’s best-performing clues for a Clue of the Month poll, contained within a thread that serves as a running commentary on the results. Or whatever. Just say!
I think it would be a good idea if you could put perhaps a weekly summary of some sort into the main blog. At the moment there’s no feed-back loop, so to speak. Over time you might also be able to analyse what types of clue are finding most favour amongst solvers. I’m not competent to say how you might do any of that so won’t stray into that territory. Jimbo.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t register with an anonymous username (at the moment, in fact, since nobody else has chosen the username “anonymous”…) and use the profile options to NOT show e.g. email address. But you do have to vote before you can see the results – again, part of the software rather than admin choice.
The PhP software that runs the forum-based polls has a few more bells and whistles, but it doesn’t allow viewing of poll results without voting – I think that’s a weakness but it’s not something that can be changed.
I’m open to suggestions. I had the idea of gathering the month’s best-performing clues for a Clue of the Month poll, contained within a thread that serves as a running commentary on the results. Or whatever. Just say!