Forum:Retiring the monthly poll

For several months (for over a year, if memory serves correctly) I've been "in charge" of the monthly poll feature on the main page. The poll often gets upwards of a thousand votes every month, which is by any measure a pretty successful thing. However, coming up with poll questions every month is notoriously hard, especially considering the nature of polling allows you to include only a few possible responses. Additionally, while getting 1000+ people to vote is a cool thing, it doesn't do much to stimulate actual activity from those people which, really, is the purpose of featured content and main page content in the first place.

All this is a way of me suggesting that we stop doing monthly polls, and instead adopt a "monthly question" feature. We've had things like this in the past - a user writes a blog post where they provide an initial prompt and ask an open-ended question, then other users leave comments in response to the question and in response to other comments. Some of these questions have been pretty successful at spurring interaction, which is an improvement over an anonymous click-and-vote poll, in my opinion.

I know that there's the concept of boldness, but I believe that this sort of change should probably be accepted by the community before it's implemented. This is especially true because I doubt that I alone will be able to come up with a question to ask every single month.

What does everyone think of this idea? --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 00:31, April 1, 2014 (UTC)