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Polls

Members create polls (“Where do we meet?”, single or multiple choice) and date polls (time slots answered yes/maybe/no) in text, announcement and forum channels, threads, DMs and group DMs; bots too. A poll is an ordinary message, encrypted like every message of an encrypted conversation; votes are separate records the node keeps next to it, one per member (the last device to vote wins), encrypted and signed by the voter’s device. Votes never count as unread messages, never notify and go with their message (deletion, purges, message retention). What the node sees in encrypted conversations: who voted on which message and when, the size of each vote, and the poll’s close time, which is plaintext so that the node can refuse late votes. Questions, options and choices stay end-to-end encrypted. In unencrypted channels the node checks polls and votes against each other.

  • Permission Create polls (create_polls, bit 39, channel-scoped, everyone by default): needed for polls the node can see (unencrypted channels) and for every message with a close time; in encrypted channels the clients enforce it, since the node cannot tell a poll from a message there. Voting needs nothing beyond View channel. At the first start with this release the node grants the bit once to every role that holds Send messages (@everyone included) and adds it to every channel or category override that allows Send messages (fixup marker fixup.create_polls in node_settings), so nobody who could write loses polls; rooms narrow it afterwards. The welcome channel never holds polls.
  • Closing: a poll’s author or a member with Manage messages closes it early, also a poll created without an end (audited as message.poll_close when it is someone else’s poll); a close time only ever moves earlier, and a poll without one never gets a future one. Retracting and changing votes is possible until the close.
  • Limits (part of the protocol, not configurable): 2–20 options, 1–60 slots, a question of at most 300 and labels of at most 100 characters, a close time 1 minute to 1 year ahead, votes of at most 4 KiB, 10 vote changes per user and minute.

“Hidden until close” and “results after voting” are honoured by the clients; every member can technically read every vote, and the clients say so. Nothing needs configuring (PROTOCOL.md §7g).

This page is generated from tavrn-node/docs/HANDBOOK.md (AGPL-3.0-only) when the website is built; its links were adapted for this site.