Show HN: Poll – Voting done simply in real time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Poll – Voting done simply in real time

poll.lab.io

45 pointsadambutler41 comments

Shameless plug: I recently needed a super simple, clean and fast way to create a poll. Since I didn't find anything to fulfill my requirements, I built my own - http://tally.tl/

And that's the poll question I wanted to ask: http://tally.tl/GQDy3

If there was an option in Tally to hide votes so they don't influence decisions, it would be more useful. We used it at Techstars recently and didn't find the results very accurate. That said, it's very slick and simple, which I really liked.

That's a very good point Patrick. It was intentional because I didn't want to add extra buttons and clutter the interface, but I might rethink it. It's always tricky to add functionality without sacrificing simplicity.

What about http://strawpoll.me/ ? Is there something that your site does differently than that one? Heres the same poll at strawpoll: http://strawpoll.me/2716564 so you can compare. This site is commonly used at twitch.tv so that the streamer can ask the viewers a question, all results update in real-time. I have seen thousands of people use it simultaneously with no problem.

It's not perfect if you're worried about people voting more than once. We tried doing an office poll about something people held strong opinions about -- what video game to bring in for an office tournament -- and within twenty minutes, coworkers had rewritten ballot stuffing scripts in bash, PHP, and Python.

Not to mention that you can submit multiple votes by opening the page in an incognito window in Chrome.

What I really need from straw poll is an option for better voting methods, if we're deciding between more than three choices for streaming we always need to use instant runoff to get an accurate measurement of what people want to watch. Something popular like Schultze voting (maybe implemented with sliders from one to ten instead of entering rank numbers; so it stays as idiot-proof as strawpoll.me)

It's a good poll tool, but the 90s interface was a deal-breaker for me.

I had the same problem and did the same thing a few years ago (http://polls.cc). I wonder how many of these websites are out there.

That's much better than everything I found during my short research. Well done!

Had I known about this I probably wouldn't have built Poll... I just wanted something elegant that didn't require registration... Good work!

Seems the Pusher quota has been exceeded for the frameworks demo.

    Error : {"type":"WebSocketError","error":{"type":"PusherError","data":{"code":4004,"message":"Account over quota"}}}

Sylvain from Pusher here. I just up the app quota for the time being since it currently using our free plan.

The app should work fine now.

Good PR. Didn't knew Pusher yet. Am i the only one?

Pusher's been around for some years. In fact they were one of the pioneers of "realtime-push-as-a-service".

That said, the space is still relatively new (yes, there is a whole space! http://leanstack.io/realtime-backend-api ). Most developers of realtime apps use their own hosting but are gradually warming up to the cloud.

as Jkarneges mentioned, we've been around for 3 years. Nowadays we don't usually target HN as a community so hence why you might not have heard of us.

However, if you have any questions about our services or feedback, let me know here or on sylvain (at) pusher dot com.

That's pretty neat of you.

I'm on it... I didn't quite expect so much traffic but wasn't going to let it ruin my lovely walk along Cheddar gorge today :)

Looks really good but I found a visual bug — the graph overflows (on small resolutions?) http://d.pr/i/mQFV

Also, are the polls embeddable? I couldn't find any information about it on your page.

Not yet... it was built very quickly just yesterday... I will be fixing and adding (a limited amount) features over the coming weeks.

How does this compare to strawpoll.me

At first impressions, seems much the same.

I like it, I made a similar one when playing with the javascript frameworks. However, outside of play, is Angular really the right choice here? 14kloc, for a poll? Seems rather excessive to me.

Thats a good point - looks like it's built on Rails too. Switch this to Node and React and it'll smoke. With Node it would also be super easy to use websockets and remove the need for Pusher too.

Not a big deal though - this is a really nice app. I just like talking about different frameworks and tools.

I agree, it's pretty slick. But the size would prevent me from using it on any mobile focused site.

The interesting part is that a couple of similar services popped up in this thread and most of them are great but not well-known, so should we have a Hacker News Toolbox?

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8413016 Poll: http://poll.lab.io/dcla2GhYRr0lDLV7icEDMw

Chart on my mba 11 is broken. http://cl.ly/XsvS/Image%202014-10-05%20at%207.47.52%20pm.png

http://poll.lab.io/NxUvq0yzAL6zd_Dh7G1XGQ/results

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0

Shameless plug: I made a real time poller myself, in despair for the status quo a year ago (I'm a teacher student). You may try it here: http://feedba.ch/

Source code: https://github.com/arve0/feedbach

I am really missing the copy link feature for my results and poll. When I was on the poll voting page I was just looking for this button to copy it and was suprised there wasn't any, you just get to used to that type of thing. But that's just small detail. I like how simple the ui is. Good work!

Looks nice, but the pie chart is really not a good choice. It's not clear at all which choice is the winner when some are close (among other things). Add an option to change to a bar chart or something else, or change the default please.

Awesome!

There are currently no good "poll as a service" solutions out there. Not long ago, I searched pretty hard and tried all I could find.

For a MVP I only miss one feature in your solution: The ability to add options later on.

That is a priority for me to be able to modify options... as I have said in other comments I just built this (very quickly in just one day) as I couldn't find anything that was elegant, free and required no registration.

I expect to get modifying options in hopefully by Wednesday if I can find the time.

Check out Wedgies - they've got a pretty slick product.

Looks cool. Only issue I had was the graph size.

https://db.tt/1RqhMsk2

I'm seeing the same bug as everyone else: the pie covers the bottom edge.

Win 8.1, Chrome (latest), 1366x768

Poll is a soon to be open-sourced project by Adam Butler

Very cool. What's the stack?

Yep... simple RoR app with Angular.js will be swapping out pusher soon for private_pub.

I will open source it just as soon as I can do an audit of any major flaws :)

Looks like Rails, Angular and Pusher to me.

It let me create a poll without typing a question or option. Might want to fix that :)

It would have been nicer if there would be comments or chat on the results page

I will be adding other features, but this will not be one of them. I built Poll because everything else made what should be simple far more complicated than it should be.

Very simply done. What were the lessons? What was the design process like?

Nice.

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