Browsing and finding polls

There are two places polls are listed, and they answer different questions.

The public directory

/polls lists polls anyone may read. No account is needed to browse it, search it, filter it or open anything on it.

A poll appears here only when all three of these are true:

1. its visibility is public;
2. its organiser chose to list it;
3. it is past draft.

None of those implies another, and the second is the one worth dwelling on.

Public is not the same as advertised

Public visibility answers who may read this poll — anyone holding the link.

Listed answers where is this poll advertised — in the directory, for strangers to find.

A poll can be public without being listed. That is the normal case for something shared with one group: the link works for whoever you send it to, and the poll does not turn up in a stranger's search. The directory says as much on the page, because a directory that quietly omits polls would otherwise read as a complete index of the platform.

If you are upgrading an existing installation, every poll that already existed is unlisted. Nothing became more visible than it was; organisers opt in per poll.

What you can do without an account

Browse, search, filter by stage and voting method, sort, switch between cards and a list, open a poll, read its options where the phase allows, read published results, and see deadlines and countdowns.

What you cannot do is act. Voting and suggesting options need an account — see Accounts and participation.

Your dashboard

Your dashboard is the polls that concern you, in one list:

• polls you created, drafts included;
• private polls you were invited to;
• public polls you have taken part in.

It deliberately does not include every advertised public poll. A personal list that filled up with strangers' polls would stop being personal — that is what the directory is for.

Filtering it

One collection, filtered rather than split into sections. You can narrow by stage, visibility, voting method, your role (organiser, invited, participant) and your participation (needs your vote, voted, not started, finished), search by title, and sort eight ways.

Everything you choose is in the address bar, so a filtered view can be bookmarked, shared with a colleague, or reloaded without losing your place. Paging never repeats or skips a poll, because every sort ends in a stable tiebreak.

The cards or list choice is remembered on your account, so it follows you between devices. Visitors without an account get the same choice, remembered in their browser instead.

Pinning what matters

Any poll on your dashboard can be pinned, and pinned polls sort to the top of the list.

A pin is yours alone. Nobody else can see it, it says nothing about the poll to anybody, and pinning a poll somebody else runs is simply a note to yourself that you want it near the top.

Two things a pin deliberately does not do:

• It does not override a filter. A pinned draft will not appear in a list filtered to "open for voting". A pin decides the order of what you asked for, not what you asked for — a pin that broke a filter would make the filtered list quietly wrong.
• It does not sort pinned polls arbitrarily. Whatever sort you chose still applies within the pinned group and within the rest, so a pinned list is still ordered the way you asked.

Press the pin again to unpin.

When something needs you

Polls waiting for your vote are marked, and the dashboard says how many there are with a shortcut to just those. That shortcut appears only while it is true: a permanent row of filter links would be navigation to learn, whereas a link that shows up when something is actually waiting is information.