Add a poll to various pages of my site?

Dave!

Hey folks,

I'm wondering if someone could point me in the direction of a site from which I can get code for a poll, or information of how to put 1 on my site.

I want to put multiple ones on it, like almost every page will have a poll (it's an important aspect of the site, I won't go into the details here), so I don't know if it's practical to use an external site to host the poll.

The polls should meet the following criteria...

1. be free
2. be subtle! I don't want big huge ugly ones, since they'll be on every page.
3. secure (1 vote per IP? that can be got around with proxies etc though, so how do ya prevent abuse?)

Thanks for any help. A google search is producing alot of results but it's hard to know which would be right for me.

DJB

I've used www.xiglasoftware.com in the past and it's quite easy to setup and use. It's not free but not expensive either. It's asp code so don't know if your server supports it so maybe you should tell us what code your site supports. You can control how subtle the poll is.

2 out of 3 ain't bad!!!!

richardo

Another is Advanced Poll which is pretty comprehensive [and free]. It's PHP based.

mneylon

You could also try http://www.polldaddy.com/ which is by an Irish company

phil

No online poll will ever be secure enough unless you have verifiable contact details.
Allowing "One per IP" isn't good. What happens with universities who have hundreds and thousands of people seemingly connected from one IP? What about companies? Even in one household, you can have two people connected from one IP.

The poll could use cookies to store information but they're saved on the client end and it doesn't take much to manually remove them.

In short, if you're looking for accurate polls that can't be fiddled with easily, use registration.

You have ease of voting and easy to fiddle with versus more effort to vote and more difficult to fiddle with. And without sounding too much like Cilla Black, the choice is yours!

Phil.

Dave!

Thanks folks.

Hmmm, phil makes a good point there. Google is producing a good few registration scripts, but I'm not sure how good they are, or how I use them

Any ideas? I'm really not familiar with the registration process. I presume all the info is stored in some sort of database and my host supports mySQL, and PHP.

What's some good software that would allow me to do this? Preferably free if that doesn't mean that it's sh*t, but if necessary I'll spend a bit of money on this (a BIT ), cos it'd probably be quite handy for other websites.

Thanks folks

steveland?

If you were so inclined you could use phpBB to set up a bulletin board on your site and then use the sessions that this creates for your users.

It's simple to do. A couple of lines of code at the top of each page (or just include a file with this code at the top of each page or in your header) and can be found quite easily around the phpBB support site.

This way you can get someone to sign up to the boards on your site, expand sessions over your whole site, have a database table that, when you vote, it marks their user_id against their vote and disallows them to vote again.

Your whole user base would then be stored in the phpbb_users table in your database. For the rest of your site just add tables to the database you're using for phpBB.

It'd require some clever coding to integrate it with polls but it could be done.

You could also create a thread for each poll in phpBB in a particular "Polls" forum and then pull the results for the display on the main pages from the phpbb_polls database. You could have a condition that if they haven't voted yet then it's pulling that particular polls options out into a form on your page, when they vote the condition's changed (via their user_id which is marked in the polls table) so that it displays only the results.

You'd have to familiarise yourself with phpBB, their database and polling systems but this is just a workaround so you don't need to create a whole poll system yourself.

Dave!

Cheers mate. That seems quite tricky, but I'll look into it -- thanks!

Bob the Builder

Well Dave, security with polls isn't a very simple matter. As stated already, there are corporations and colleges that have dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands from one IP.

You should use cookies, it would be the easiest and probably most viable option. And there is no 100% safe way to prevent two votes from one person, proxies are a pain in da rear end but yah gotta live with 'em..

...as for PHP polls, this website has most of them, well all the good ones...have a look. If you want any help at all with anything, i'm free most of the time to give you a hand.:D

~Nev

Dave!

Thanks again lads.

I'm revisiting this site, and I'm gonna do it properly now

I'm thinking that registration is the way to go. I'll put a phpBB forum on the site (I've got them on other sites, so I can set them up just fine).

Then what I want to do is the following.........

1- Add a login form to the main page of my site (not on the actual forum), which will keep the member logged into the same session until they log out (or clear their cookies, or whatever!)

That means that they can visit the other pages on the site and stay logged in.

2- Then an important feature of the site is that the member/user can vote in polls that I will put on various pages. What code would I need to put onto the page to make a little poll (not like the big ones at the top of the thread in the actual forum)?

Thanks for any help, I'm googling like crazy, but hopefully ye can share ye'r own nuggets of genius with me

Liam Byrne

And there is no 100% safe way to prevent two votes from one person

Speaking of which, where are those e-voting machines that the government spent our €15 million on ?