Polls Guide

Introduction

Viafoura's Polls lets you capture audience opinion directly on your site through simple, engaging vote-based interactions. Whether you're gauging reader sentiment on a breaking story, running a weekly survey, or collecting feedback on a product, Polls give your audience a quick and frictionless way to participate.

Polls can be deployed anywhere on your site, independent of the commenting experience, including homepages, section pages, and article pages. You can configure whether users need to be logged in to vote or view results, or keep participation open to anonymous visitors.

Features of Viafoura’s Polls

• Real-time results: Vote counts update instantly as audience members cast their votes, with no page refresh required.
• Up to 10 answer options: Create polls with anywhere from 2 to 10 options to capture nuanced audience sentiment
• Drag-and-drop option ordering: Reorder poll options during setup by dragging them into position. The order is preserved when the poll is published.
• Flexible authentication: Configure whether users must be authenticated to vote or to view results, or keep participation open to anonymous visitors.
• Independent Rendering: Polls render independently on any page without requiring any other Viafoura product.

To Create a New Poll

Viafoura Polls require our script to be present on the page it will appear on. Refer to our Getting Started guide for instructions.

In your CMS, create a new article or event page where the Poll will appear.

In the article body, at the position you want the Poll to appear, paste the following code snippet:

<vf-poll class="viafoura"></vf-poll>

If your publishing platform does not automatically generate a unique container ID for the event, include it manually:

<vf-poll class="viafoura" vf-container-id="[UNIQUE-ID]"></vf-poll>

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Note
Each Poll must have a unique ID to correctly load and track the event data.

This can be derived from the article slug, date, or a manually assigned identifier.

Launching a Poll

Once the Poll tag is properly added to the page:

1. Load the page using an Admin/Staff-level account.
2. The Poll setup container will automatically appear for users with sufficient permissions.
   From this setup container, staff can configure the poll details.
3. Once the setup is successfully completed ('Publish Poll'), the Poll will initialize and become visible to your audience for participation.

Configure the Poll

Poll Question & Options

Enter the question you want to ask your audience, along with the answer options they can vote on. A minimum of 2 and a maximum of 10 options are supported. Options can be reordered by dragging them into position before publishing.

Character Limits:

Poll Question: 120 characters

Each Option: 100 characters

*A character counter will appear once you are within 10 characters of the limit and will remain visible if the limit is exceeded. The poll cannot be published while any field is over its limit.

Poll Close Time

When creating a poll, you can optionally set a date and time for the poll to automatically close. Once the close time is reached, the poll will stop accepting votes and results will be revealed to the audience. If no close time is set, the poll will remain open for voting indefinitely until you manually close it. Note that once a close time has been set, it cannot be edited, though you can still close or delete the poll manually at any time.

Managing the Poll

Closing vs Deleting a Poll

Closing a Poll stops it from accepting new votes. The poll remains visible to your audience and results are displayed to anyone who views it. This is useful when a poll has run its course but you still want the results to be accessible on the page.

Deleting a poll removes it from view entirely. The audience will no longer see the poll on the page.

In both cases, all vote data is retained and saved.

Poll Display and Overflow

When a poll's content exceeds 270px in height, the answer choices will be displayed in a collapsed state with a "Show all options" prompt for the audience to expand them. This can be triggered by a combination of factors including longer questions, lengthy answer options, or a higher number of options. Keep this in mind when creating polls — if you are using many options or longer answer text, your audience may need to take an extra step to see all available choices before voting.

Admin Portal Settings for Polls

Authentication requirements for polls is a site-level behaviour managed through the Polls module in the Viafoura Admin portal. These settings apply across all polls on the site.

The following settings are available:

• Require user authentication to vote: When enabled, only logged-in users can cast a vote. Anonymous visitors will not be able to participate.
• Require user authentication to see results: When enabled, only logged-in users can view poll results. This setting works independently of the 'Require user authentication to vote' setting — for example, you can allow anonymous voting while still restricting results to logged-in users only.