A "poll" feature?

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Well, here is one sketch, please add your suggestions.

Propose a poll (subject to some reputation requirement) --> wait till it collects enough votes --> open poll for a certain duration.

Polls can be of types: "select all that apply", "select only one of possible answers".

There may be a limit of time when the voters can change their mind.

Before the poll is open for voting, it can be edited, when the poll opens, it cannot be changed.

Poll posts can be commented.

Polls can be followed by email or via on-screen notification.

How about approaching this not as integration of a single "poll" application but a problem of being able to add new applications to askbot infrastructure that would take advantage of community moderation features? Then the problem boils down to: http://askbot.org/en/question/130/modularity-and-extensibility-of-askbot

With Django it is easy to build an application, be it a blog, poll, photo gallery, etc. Instead of concentrating on the flow of one specific application, we can concentrate on separating the community feature like reputation, badges, tagging, etc. and make them work with different content applications. This way anyone that can build a basic Django application can have their own applications in their own ways.

cheers.

My suggestion on the ask.sagemath.org site was similar to the following, but I will refine it some: Separate/Distinguish conspicuously the Q/A section from the Polls section both visually and input/output-wise. There is a lot of unused space in the lower-parts of pages (in the right or left-hand-side columns). Alternatively, the Polls could link from a second row of tabs, either at the top or bottom of the page.

Digressing, I think sometimes certain questions really beg follow-up questions. It would be nice if one could link/group questions (in a directed graph sense). Just like you have a tags input box, you could have a "Dependency of Question(s):" Box beneath that one, perhaps an html textarea input (more input lines). Currently people use a regular link for this, but it would be an interesting alternative grouping/presentation.

Well, you can do a poll already. Just add a question, e.g. "Which operating system do you use?", then post a few answers to your own question: "Windows", "Linux", etc. Instruct your users to upvote the appropriate answer. You can close the question when you get enough answers.

After reading the comments and thinking about it some more, I realize that a "poll" is not really what I'm looking for. But it is still probably a desirable feature. So as not to "mix up" what I'm suggesting with a true poll, I'm going to open a new question: User defined/selected badges.