consider not sending open poll reminders

[jeremyspiegel]

"Your poll 'Test' is still open after 24 hours. Remind your friends to vote, or close the poll?"

What's the reasoning behind this notification?

[jeremyspiegel]

Also, is this the right forum for that type of question?

[ChrisLoer]

Sure, I think it's a fine forum. I added this notification because it was relatively common for users to create a poll, get a bunch of people to vote on it, but then never close the poll. I hypothesized that many of these users fell into two camps:

1. They didn't realize they had to close the poll for people to send out results. Ideally, the UI would somehow make it more obvious, but the notification could be a stop-gap. I considered automatically closing polls or even not having a closed state at all (results just show live as people vote), but decided the voting dynamics worked better with a clear close.

2. They invited their friends but not everyone responded right away, so they started waiting. After a day, they may have just forgotten that they had opened the poll, or maybe they're still waiting for one voter, but it might start making sense to give up on the straggler.

I worried about annoying people with an extra notification, but I felt OK about this one since it was pretty closely tied to action by the user (opening a poll the day before). I released this change along with a bunch of other stuff (like the introductory "coach marks") intended to help more users complete polls, so I don't know if this particular change led to much improvement. I'll try to see if there's a spike in polls that were closed ~24 hours after they were opened, since that would indicate the feature is at least helping with the superficial goal of getting more polls closed.

[ChrisLoer]

Roughly 1% of closed polls were closed between 24 and 25 hours after creation. Probably not making a big difference.

[jeremyspiegel]

OK, I see.

For the case where someone doesn't understand they need to close the poll, I may not have thought this through enough, but it seems that auto-closing the poll when everyone has voted would be easier than requiring the creator to close it. How did the voting dynamics work better with a clear close?

If a poll creator is actually waiting on someone to vote, they won't need a reminder, and if they're not, they've probably given up on the poll in the first place.

For the case where someone actually wants to abandon a poll, getting the notification 24 hours later seems pretty strange to me.