Staying up to date

Democratia does not update pages by itself. A page shows what was true when it was drawn, and it says when that was. To see what has changed since, you press refresh.

The refresh control

Pages that can go stale while you are reading them — a poll, your poll collection — have a refresh button next to the heading, along with the time of the last update.

Pressing it re-checks everything, not just the words on screen:

• the poll's status, including a deadline that has passed since the page loaded
• whether options are open, and which options exist
• whether you can vote, and whether your ballot can still be changed
• participant and ballot counts
• whether results have been published
• and the actions available to you

That last point is the one that matters. A refresh that updated the status text but left a Vote button behind would be worse than no refresh at all: the page would look current and then fail when you used it. So the buttons are re-evaluated together with everything else, from the same state.

What refreshing keeps

Refreshing is not the same as reloading, and it deliberately preserves the things a reload would throw away:

• your filters, sorting, view mode and page number
• anything you have typed and not yet saved
• your scroll position

You can refresh in the middle of writing a poll option and lose nothing. The parts of the page that accept input are outside the region that gets replaced.

Why there is no live updating

Democratia has no background polling, no websockets and no push. This is a choice, not a gap.

Live-updating a page somebody is reading moves things under their cursor, and live-updating a ballot somebody is filling in is worse still. Explicit refresh means the page only ever changes when you ask it to, and you always know whether what you are looking at is current — because the page tells you when it was drawn.

Releases

Democratia has no version number. Releases are identified by the date they were made, which is what the changelog is organised by, and the date of the current release appears in the footer of every page.

A version number would be a second answer to "which release is this?" — and the one likelier to go stale, since it means nothing without a table mapping it to a date. The date is the useful fact on its own: you can compare it to when you last used the application.