Poll Site Feedback

[wrichards8]

I have set up a site which allows users to create polls which expire after a certain amount of time. You can find the site at http://www.makepoll.co.uk and it emails you the results of a poll 30 mins after the expiry date (using a cronjob). It would be really great if I could get some feedback on the site

[Temor]

First of all, the colors!!! They are hurting my eyes!!

Design wise, you have some work do to, clearly.
But otherwise it's looking like you've got the basics done.

I would, instead of having a drop down list with how many options you want, either let the user type in the number himself or show him a default list of say 10 empty options, with a button to add more if needed.

And the Time Limit drop down is a bit confusing. Instead of having hours ( half hours, quarter hours etc ) have maybe 30 minutes -> 1 hour -> 3 hours -> 6 hours -> 12 hours -> 24 hours -> 2 days -> 3 days etc
Or let the user type in how many hours he wants himself. Scrolling through a list to find 72 hours is a bit of a hassle. It's easier finding 3 Days. You also don't need that many options. No one want's to run a poll for 3 days and 15 minutes. It's either 3 days or 3 days and 12 hours.

And when a user has cast his vote, you should log the IP. As it is now, I can just refresh the page and vote a billion times.
Also, you should show the current stats after a vote has been cast. Right now there is no way for the votee to know what the stats are. I like seeing what others cast their vote on.

And another thing. You should make it so that one could, if the poll-creator desires, vote on more than one option at once. I.e use both checkboxes and radios.

I might have more feedback for you at a later time. Just quickly going through the first things that came to mind.

[wrichards8]

I'll take those points on board. I did, however, think about logging the IP but I actively decided against it since there could be multiple people sitting behind a single public IP address (i.e. a NAT router) meaning the system would be rendered useless within a university or school environment as only one student per campus would be able to vote .

[ScTech]

You could set a (encrypted) cookie on the user's browser. It can be cleared, but it's better than nothing. As for the feedback, I suppose the design is fair for the type of site it is. However, as Temor said, the colors aren't easy on the eyes.

A few things that could be addressed would be:

• Error messages (Preferably on the same page as the form). I spent a few minutes on it hitting the back button until I realized I forgot an @ in the email field.
• Your use of addslashes makes it so every apostrophe gets escaped.
• Require the user to answer the survey. I didn't select an option and it said it was recorded.
• Like many of the known ask and answer sites, you could require the user enter at least one question mark.
• Perhaps through the use of JavaScript, or your 2nd page, you could allow users to add more questions.
• You have an XSS vulnerability with ?p=results on the results page. http://www.makepoll.co.uk/item/H3935N?p=results
• There is a bug where multiple surveys stack results. It appears that you're fetching all answers but not limiting it to the specified survey id so every answer for every active survery is listed.
• Something of cocern with the above is that you should really be (you could already be) keeping all surveys in the database, but just use an enum 0,1 field or something for whether active or not. You never know what people will put in there and it could be of illegal activity that you are (should feel) obligated to keep on record as a web developer. To be more fancy, you could blacklist some surveys based on a list of words and keep them from being deleted. That way it can help with loading issues.

[killfrog47]

I have set up a site which allows users to create polls which expire after a certain amount of time. You can find the site at http://www.makepoll.co.uk and it emails you the results of a poll 30 mins after the expiry date (using a cronjob). It would be really great if I could get some feedback on the site

Like the others I will say design haha. Look in to using bootstrap due to everyone having a mobile phone and it would be easy for them to just click a link vote on there phone and boom website usability!

And as far as multiple votes, like ScTech said, a cookie would be the next best option to track who has already voted. Only problem with that is cookies can be cleared =/