Wanted: polls

Yeah, how about that "What do you think of the new website?" poll

I don't know that HFBoards thing. But I've seen other forums where the first post in a forum thread can have a poll question, and typically these are just dumb questions that rarely result in more than 10 votes.

Naturally people can always contact us and suggest a poll. In a few occasions we've actually used such a suggested poll.

Often, suggested polls are technically not entirely right though - and even among the crew such suggestions occur! For a poll you'd typically assume 3..5 poll options. Maybe more in case of a "what is the best MSXdev'09 game". But often, people suggest things like: "what is the best MSX1 game" or "which MSX has the best keyboard action" or "which game has the best FM-PAC music" or "which game introdemo is the best". All these are not regular polls but megapolls, because the number of poll options would be enormous. A megapoll can certainly be done once in a while, but only the last round would be a frontpage poll. So a megapoll suggestion is not a solution for 'right now and exactly at this moment', they'll easily take up a season, because you need nominating rounds too.

Another example of how we do discuss things internally, but may not agree on the outcome. You may recall I put the amount of cartridge slots onto the table some weeks ago. This, in context of having a ROM game that would support both G9k and Moonsound - you'd be one cartridge slot short! And this would actually be a good question as developers may choose to not create a ROM game for G9k and Moonsound if they found out their audience is only 5 people.

So, poll could be like: "do you have a slotexpander?"
But a 'yes' or 'no' doesn't tell anything about whether those 'yes'-people also have a G9k and Moonsound.

"Do you have a slotexpander and G9k and Moonsound?"
- only slotexpander
- slotexpander and G9k
- slotexpander and Moonsound
- slotexpander and G9k and Moonsound

That already tells you more, but it doesn't tell you how many people plan on buying one of these expansions. Nor does it tell anything about the number of available slots. Perhaps the person doesn't want to switch cartridges all the time and uses the other slots for Memory, IDE/CF/SD/HD/CD, NoWind, an SCC, FM-PAC, MusMod etc. Nor does this tell anything about such owners wanting to buy a game. What if someone has all these expansions (and clicks the expected poll option), but: nicely stacked in a box in the attic, gathering dust, while his daily shot o' MSX is done with emulators?

So, the discussion goes on, and ends with the suggestion to add a hardware page to the account of people, where they can tag what they have. But that's a lot of work again, and then the discussion arises how detailed this page should become. Should every single MSX model be clickable? Can FM-PAC and MSX-Music be merged into one option? And even then: does everyone actually update his profile page once such a page is there?

I still find these amount of cartridge slots an interesting question, but we're not quite through about how to represent this as a poll that gives information. And sure, there's certainly a place for silly polls we shouldn't take very seriously. But this slots poll is really one I want to know about, as a game developer it also concerns me..

@ 1: You'd get bombarded with questions like "but why isn't this model and that model an option? I like this and that model more than all of your options combined!!!!111!!!1"

@2: if you have 3 separate polls asking for slotexpander, g9k and moonsound, you'll have no guarantees that the people who voted are all the same. Ultimately you want to know how many people there are who have all three of them.