Have you ever wished to measure your team’s sentiments on a topic with a live poll? There is a free Rocket.Chat app for that!

As many of you discovered already, you can easily use the poll app to perform basic polls. But most of you found the existing poll app rather limiting. We heard you!

We’ve launched a new app — the Poll Plus app that can do much more than the old app on Rocket.Chat. It’s ability to allow user-defined options, post word clouds, conduct live polls and re-use poll templates make it a Poll App with superpowers!

Why You Not Me — Allow Everyone to Add Options!

Earlier, poll options could not be changed after the poll creator posted the poll in a room. While this works fine, Poll Plus does this better and further engages your community by allowing room members to add options after posting the poll!

Live Polls — Unlimited, Timed Polls

What if you could conduct standup or retro feedback for your teams right within Rocket.Chat? Or, perhaps, could schedule live quizzes for your class to be retrieved on the test day? Introducing Live Polls. Live Polls are a collection of polls with a customizable end time-limit for each poll.

Create a live poll by sending /poll live <number of polls> within any room. For example, if you want a total of two questions, send /poll live 2, which opens up the poll creator modal.

Each poll within a Live Poll has a time limit to vote upon after which the current Poll ends and the next one is posted. Poll creators can also click on the “Next Poll” button to trigger a pre-scheduled finish of the current Poll.

The “Time limit to vote” each poll is set as the number of seconds you want that poll to be active.

Let’s take a look at the Live Poll in action!

Save Poll Template and Reuse Later

Speaking of teachers using Rocket.Chat for exams, the Live Poll Late Retrieval feature proves an excellent tool for teachers to create quizzes even weeks before and then schedule the quiz on D-day with ease. All this while having control over the time limit to answer each question.

To use the Late Retrieval feature make use of the save subcommand in the format: /poll live save <number of polls>.

Post-creation of the Live Poll, a message along with the poll id to retrieve it will be visible only to the poll creator like in the following image.

Make use of the /poll live <id> command to “play” the Live Poll. Here is the poll id that was visible to the poll creator.

You can find more information about this feature within its documentation here.

Word Clouds — Visualize Your Polls Better!

Imagine a better way to visualize your poll results. No we’re not talking about adding colors to bar graphs (we did that already in Poll Plus xD ), we‘re talking about word clouds! Bar graphs are okay, word clouds are awesome.

Poll Plus requires a word cloud API that returns image results to actually post the word cloud. The URL to the API can be set by the Rocket.Chat administrator from the Poll Plus settings menu.

By default, the Quickchart word cloud API is pre-filled. A limitation of using the free version of Quickchart API is a rate-limitation of 60 requests per min per IP and requirement of public Internet access. If your Rocket.Chat server is hosted on-premise or if you require more customizations than Quickchart, we’ve open-sourced a word cloud API here. It’s usage can also be seen in the settings menu image above.

In the event you leave the endpoint field blank or the API doesn’t return a valid result, the Poll Plus app would instead display the poll summary when the word cloud is set to enabled.

Template Based Polls

Tired of repetitively filling out the same options to your Poll? Just use template based polls. The Poll Plus App includes pre-filled templates for five most commonly used poll types — 1-to-5 poll, 1-to-10 poll, Agree/Disagree polls, Overrated/Underrated polls, Emoji Rank polls. Just type your questions and let Poll Plus do the cumbersome job of filling in the options.

Mixed Visibility Polls

Don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings on a Men In Black 3 like/dislike poll? Just make the dislike option Anonymous with Mixed Visibility Poll mode.

In addition to completely revealing or veiling the identities of voters through the open and confidential visibilities mode, Poll Plus gives you the middle way out. With Poll Plus poll creators have the flexibility of customizing which options should not reveal voter identities. Here’s how it works.

Upgrade Your Polling Experience with Poll Plus Today!

Poll Plus is a major upgrade over the older Poll App. Conduct team activities like stand-up, retro or opinion polls without leaving Rocket.Chat. Plan quizzes for your students and post them on the exam day or just post polls to know what your friends think of your favorite movie!

Poll Plus is completely free and open-source, forever. Download Poll Plus from the Rocket.Chat App Marketplace. On-premise users can directly clone the Poll Plus repository and install it for their servers using the Rocket.Chat Apps-Engine.

Get started with the feature-by-feature installation, set-up and usage documentation for the Poll Plus app.

Want to see a feature we missed including within Poll Plus? Raise an issue or start a discussion on the Poll Plus repository and we’ll be in touch!

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Rohan Lekhwani is an open source contributor and enthusiast. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, and his website.