Why Simple, Low-Effort Polls are Vital
Proposing ideas and voting on decisions play a crucial role in VitaDAO’s governance. The first phase of our governance process requires at least five people to support an idea before it is eligible for a phase 2 proposal on Discourse. Yet, to date, this process has been rather tedious and intransparent. Proposing authors had to ask for comments or emoji reactions and manually remind people to give feedback. At the same time, it was rather difficult to keep track of the support that a particular idea has received when it was spread out across comments and various emoji reactions. This kept us from funnelling more ideas towards a proposal phase and likely made us miss out on some worthwhile encounters.
Introducing a Bot for Polls
Using Dyno bot, we have a simple way to create polls directly in a Discord channel where anyone can vote through emoji reactions. The bot will automatically create all the voting options through emoji reactions for you so that you as the proposing author do not need to do that yourself and can vote yourself.
Supported Types of Polls
You can create polls with up to ten choices. In principle, only multi-choice polls are supported. However, you could phrase your question to make it effectively a single-choice poll (though technically, people will still be able to choose multiple options). You may also insert an “other” option, asking people to comment their individual answer below.
Availability of this Poll Bot
Polls can be created in any channel in our Discord, but not in private messages or private message groups. Currently, this feature is limited to anyone who has the Discord role “working group member” or “working group guest”. After a test phase, we will roll it out to everyone on our Discord.
How to Use the Poll Bot
A poll is created through a command with three elements: The command to call the bot, a title, and the options. For help, just use the command "?poll".
Creating a Poll
The scheme to create a poll is as follows:
?poll [question] "[choice 1]" "[choice ...]" "[choice 10]"
The bot will add number emojis for each of your options in the order of appearance.
Note that the bot accepts upper quotation marks only. Lower quotation marks, single quotes or other quotation marks are not accepted. Depending on your local keyboard settings, the right quotation marks may not be the default quotation marks, but most keyboards should have them. In case of doubt, use this basic latin quotation mark ".
For example, the command to choose between a red pill and a blue pill would be:
?poll Do you want the red pill or the blue pill? "Red pill" "Blue pill"
Showing Results of a Poll
To show the results of a poll, use the command ?poll show followed by the message ID or a link to the message. You can retrieve the latter by right clicking (or long pressing on mobile) on the poll and choosing the “Copy message link” option. The last number of that link refers to the message ID, but you may also just insert the whole link.
Alternatively, you can also right click (long press on mobile) and choose “Reactions” to see who voted for which option(s). This is also how you can track whether someone has voted for multiple options when the poll was designed as a single-choice poll.
Please comment feedback and questions below or reach out to be at theobtl#5976 on Discord. Click here to join VitaDAO’s Discord.