196264 - a voting system (opinion poll) on mozilla.org homepage

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org :: Miscellaneous, task)

Description

[Vaclav Dvorak]

In many bugs, people are debating whether some feature should be implemented one
way or another, whether users want something, what behaviour they are used to,
etc. Sometimes, it would be useful to make a public, highly visible opinion
poll. The Bugzilla voting/commenting system is insufficient for this, mainly for
two reasons: 1) it's inherently targeted at hackers, or at least advanced users,
and 2) the relevant bugs are usually found by those who agree with the bug's
summary/intention, so you won't see many voices against the bug.

What I'm proposing is placing an opinion poll right on the mozilla.org front
page (and perhaps other related pages, even to the point of allowing any
webmaster to place the poll on their web), so that it has high visibility of
normal users. The poll would be held for, say, a week, and then changed for
another one. (If there is not enough demand, the poll can be held longer, of
course.)

I am not saying that the poll results should be binding. But at least, they
would serve for making more informed decisions about bugs/rfe's/change requests.
Statements like "users tend to", "unix users are used to", "people wouldn't
want", etc., would gain - or lose - weight when based on real statistics.

Of course, there are problems with this system, too. It would still be a little
bit hacker-targetted. And it's not trivial to make the voting system reasonably
cheat-proof (actually, probably the only really reliable way is requiring email
confirmation and saving the addresses). But still, I think it's worth a thought.
What do you think?

Comment 1

[Mitchell Baker]

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestion.  Right now mozillaZine runs polls, and the
mozilla.org staff is stretcched so that we barely get the website updated for
factual matters.  So i think we should continue to have polls of interst to the
community as mozillaZine.   Closing this bug. 

mitchell