Polls & voting

Lightweight community polling. Admins post a question with two or more options, residents pick one, and an optional discussion channel anchors the conversation.

Who can create and vote

Polls are created by admins (admin or system_admin role). Residents with status approved can vote in any open poll; pending and denied accounts can’t.

One vote per user per poll. Changing your mind is a re-vote, not a stack: the backend upserts on (poll_id, user_id), so your latest pick wins.

What a poll looks like

A poll has a question, an optional description, and at least 2 options (max 20). Each option has text and an optional image. Vote counts render on the card, with the leading option highlighted. After you vote, the results become visible; before you vote, the question and options are all you see.

Open polls sort to the top of the page, and within the open list, polls you haven’t voted on sort above polls you have. Closed polls fall to the bottom for archive-style browsing.

Anonymous polls

Each poll has an is_anonymous flag, set at creation time. When true, the results show counts only; nobody (including the admin who created the poll) can see who voted for what. When false, voter avatars stack under each option so the community can see who agreed with whom.

Linked discussion channels

At create time the admin can check “Create discussion channel.” This spawns a chat channel slugged from the poll question (e.g. poll-should-we-repave-the-lot), placed in the chat sidebar under the “polls” group. Voters can argue there without cluttering the main community channel.

Closing the poll auto-archives the linked channel (moves it to the archived section). Reopening the poll moves the channel back to where it was.

Open vs closed

Two statuses: open (accepting votes) and closed (read-only). Toggling from the admin card flips the status and stamps a closed_at timestamp. Deleting a poll also deletes its linked discussion channel if one was created.