The default language is geared toward traditional surveys but as I mentioned earlier not all of you are using Polldaddy for traditional surveys. This is where language packs come in. Let’s say you are using Polldaddy to do registration for a conference you are organizing.

The default submit button simply says “Finish Survey”, but if you aren’t conducting a traditional survey this language seems out of place and can be confusing to your users. In a few seconds with a language pack you can change that button to say “Submit Registration” instead.

If you want to give language packs a try please check out the step by step directions found in our support documentation. As always if you run into any trouble please drop us a line and we would be glad to help you out.

Edit styles and language packs as you create your poll

Previously, both styles and language packs had a tab in the main navigation — which some users had difficulty locating. We’ve moved both these important tools to the areas in which you create and edit polls so that now, all the tools you need to style and/or customize standard phrases and error messaging are right at your fingertips. Check out our nifty new design for polls:

Re-order, branch questions, edit styles, and language as you create your survey or quiz

With surveys and quizzes, we’ve enhanced the user interface even further, bringing survey styles, and language packs closer to the action in a set of handy tabs across the top of the survey creation area. Question re-ordering and question branching now live in the question editor.

Our goal is to continuously make it easier for you to create surveys, polls, and quizzes more intuitively, so that you can focus on collecting the data you need to improve your organization.

The data you collect is important, and having tools to help analyse it is also important. You’ve always been able to dig deeper into your data using filters - conditions or rules that you create to reduce a large set of data into something more useful.

For example, you can filter your survey results to only show responses from a specific country, or from people who answered ‘yes’ to a particular question.

These filters are now easier to use – just click on any option in a multi-choice question, when viewing a survey report:

This will automatically create a filter that shows only responses with that selection.

You can further refine the filter by clicking other multi-choice options, or for advanced users, you can edit the filter and add custom restrictions.

People with large sets of data will find the system now shows the progress of the filter and allows you to continue working. You can return to the report once it has finished.

Note that you can export filtered data using any of our export methods, such as PDF or Excel, making it an ideal way of producing custom reports. Both filters and exporting are available in paid accounts only.

Please let us know if there are other ways you want to view your data. There’s more to come, and we’re always listening!

Since Automattic acquired Polldaddy in 2008, our user account system has been separate from the main WordPress.com account system at Automattic, and while WordPress.com users are poised to receive many fine updated features for their accounts, Polldaddy customers weren’t going to benefit from these improvements without a big change on our part. We decided that while a transition could be a bit painful, it was time to unify our user account system across all of our products to best serve our customers in the most timely and efficient manner now and in the future.

What this means for you:

This means that as of today, you’ll be required to sign into Polldaddy by using a WordPress.com account. At this point, you probably fall into one of three categories.

If you don’t have a free WordPress.com account:

• You’ll need to create one to log into Polldaddy.
• You won’t need to manage separate accounts for VaultPress or Akismet.
• You can learn more at the WordPress.com Connect support page.

If you already have a WordPress.com account:

• Awesome! You’re good to go. Just click “Sign in with WordPress.com” and if you’re already logged into WordPress.com, you’ll just have to click “Authorize” and you’ll be on your way.
• If you’re not signed into WordPress.com, go ahead and sign in, and then click “Authorize” to allow Polldaddy access to your WordPress.com account (only your name and email address are shared at the moment).
• One account will allow you access to both WordPress.com and Polldaddy.
• You can learn more at the WordPress.com Connect support page.

If you’re not sure whether you have a WordPress.com account:

You may have a WordPress.com account and not know it. If you use any of the following services, you can log into WordPress.com with the same account you use for them:

• Akismet
• VaultPress
• Jetpack
• IntenseDebate
• Gravatar

If none of those sound familiar to you, then you most likely don’t have a WordPress.com account and can go ahead and create one.

An important item to note: your WordPress.com account is separate from any accounts you use to log into any self-hosted WordPress sites. If you or your company has downloaded and installed your own copy of WordPress, you still need to create a WordPress.com account in order to use Polldaddy.

Once your WordPress.com account has been created and verified, you are just about ready to log into your Polldaddy account. Only once, and only on the first time, you will be asked to enter your old Polldaddy username and password to connect your two accounts. Once this is done, you’ll log in exclusively with your WordPress.com account. While we understand that this process can be a bit cumbersome, it only has to be done once, and you’ll be able to log in with a click of a button from now on.

We thank you for your patience and we are excited to bring you some good stuff once our account system is completely merged with WordPress.com.

An easy to use interface allows you to login to Twitter using their oAuth interface. Your password is never shared with Polldaddy but we do need permission to post tweets to your account.

Sample tweets are provided and template tags are used to make it easy to add poll name, answers or URL to each tweet.

Example tweets are provided but you can edit the message as much as you like. Be mindful of the 140 character Twitter limit on message length. The [NAME] and [URL] template tags will be replaced with the name and the URL of the poll. They may bump the length of your message over 140 characters so a limit of 130 characters is imposed to help avoid that. A preview of the message is also available:

Scheduling a tweet is simple with the aid of a date and time picker.

It’s recommended that tweets be scheduled with hours or even days between them to avoid sending messages too quickly. A 10 minute gap between sending of tweets is imposed so if the process is paused by the user any queued messages will be sent with that gap between them.

Tweets can be edited after they have been scheduled, tweeting can be paused and tweets deleted before they are sent. If an error occurs sending the tweet to Twitter that error is recorded on the Promote page and that message will be skipped until the error has been fixed. The error is usually that the message is too long or the message is a duplicate of an existing Twitter message.

Happy Tweeting!

On December 3rd, 2012, we will be merging our account systems, so you’ll use your WordPress.com account to sign in to Polldaddy.

Not only will this be one fewer password to remember, but it will allow us to provide you with more great features in the future.

Many of you already have a WordPress.com account, so you can connect it to your Polldaddy account with two clicks. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account, you can create one by heading to the WordPress.com signup page (and don’t worry, you don’t have to create a blog to create an account – although we’d love it if you did). Once you’ve created your account, you can connect it to Polldaddy.com using the same steps described below.

Connecting Polldaddy and WordPress.com

From the Polldaddy login page, click on the Sign In With WordPress.com button:

If you are already logged in to WordPress.com you will be prompted to authorise the connection between your WordPress.com and Polldaddy account.

Alternatively, if you are not logged in to WordPress.com, you will be asked to login and authorise:

Once authorised you may be asked to enter your Polldaddy details if we cannot automatically determine which account you own:

Your accounts will now be connected. As long as you’re logged in to WordPress.com, you can log in to Polldaddy by simply pressing the Sign In With WordPress.com button.

When is this happening?

You can connect your accounts anytime, starting today

Beginning November 12th, you’ll get a gentle reminder to connect them when you sign in to Polldaddy. On December 3rd, you won’t be able to sign in to Polldaddy until you connect with WordPress.com.

If you need any help connecting your account, or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write to us in support.

IP whitelisting

This restriction allows you to specify an IP address, multiple IP addresses or a range of IP addresses from which votes must originate, otherwise the vote is rejected.

Email whitelisting

This restriction allows you to specify an email address, any email address or use a wildcard to specify a range of email addresses that a voter must have access to in order for their vote to be registered.

With this restriction in place and someone votes on a poll, they must now enter an email address in a text field. When the voter submits their email address, an email is sent to that email address with a confirmation link. The vote will only be registered when the voter clicks on this confirmation link.

If you have the poll set to block repeat voters, the voter can only enter the same email address once.

The email address will also show up in the vote analysis report next to the vote.

http://support.polldaddy.com/email-address-whitelisting-for-polls/

CAPTCHA Protection

With CAPTCHA protection enabled, a voter will be requested to enter a CAPTCHA before their vote is registered. This is a good option to help prevent poll hacking while leaving the poll open to the public to vote.

Password Protection

This restriction allows you to specify a password that a voter must enter before their vote is registered. Only voters with access to this password will have access to registering votes on your poll.

http://support.polldaddy.com/password-protect-polls/

You can set your poll to use one or all of the poll restrictions at any time. With restrictions in place, your poll will behave slightly different.

If you are using a JavaScript poll embed on your site, the poll will allow the user to first submit their vote. This vote will not be registered until the user has passed whatever restriction or set of restrictions you have set.

If you are using the direct link to the poll (hosted on our site), then the poll behaves a little different again. The voter will not be able to vote until they have first passed the restriction rules, i.e. If you have CAPTCHA protection enabled, the voter will need to fill in the CAPTCHA before they can vote.

We hope you find this set of features useful and if you have any suggestions, feedback or bug reports please get back to us here.

This set of restrictions are only available for all our Pro and Corporate subscribers – Upgrade Now!

This means you no longer have to individually export these questions to get a full set of data, making it super easy to distribute results to colleagues.

The PDF export feature is available to all paid accounts, and can be found by clicking the export button at the top of every report page.

From the drop-down, then select PDF:

You can find more information about the ways to export your Polldaddy data from our exporting survey data support page.

Check out Barbara’s fantastic video:

To get started, log in to your Polldaddy dashboard. Click on the big blue Create a new… dropdown and select Quiz:

Give your quiz a name. Note that when your quiz’s URL is created, it will include the title you choose:

Next, choose a style for your survey. We’re going to stick with the default style, Surveymattic:

Showing results

Now let’s set the options under Participant results. The default setting here is Show full results to the participants once they finish the quiz, and we’re going to keep that in place for our quiz. You can also select a passing score from the dropdown.

Set up custom start and finish messages

Let’s set up some custom messages that our participants will see before they start the quiz, and after they complete it. (Note that custom finish messages are available to Professional and Corporate customers.) Be creative! Have fun with your messages. Be sure to inject a little personality into the quiz to set participants at ease:

Closing a quiz on a preset date or when you’ve reached your quota

You can choose when to close your quiz, be it on a date that you choose, or after a certain number of quiz completions. The default quota is set to 1000, however you can change that number to anything you like:

Select a language pack, if you wish

You can also choose to assign a language pack, to change any of the default button and quiz text to any text in any language you like. If you’ve already created a language pack for your quiz, you would select it from the dropdown list, here:

Toggle question numbers on and off

Sometimes, you’d prefer not to have question numbers in your quiz. Question numbers are on by default, though you can turn them off by unchecking the box next to Show question numbers:

Repeat quiz completions?

You can then decide whether or not you want to allow repeat quiz completions:

Password protect and / or restrict to participants from a certain IP address

You can choose to set a password that participants must enter to be allowed to complete the quiz. Additionally, if you wish to restrict your participants to a pre-defined set of IP addresses, you can enter them here. This setting is particularly useful if you want to allow, say only your employees or students to take the quiz:

When you’re done selecting your quiz’s options, be sure to click on the big blue, Save Settings button:

Click and drag to add elements to your quiz

Click and drag quiz elements from the column on the left to the quiz area. Let’s put in a page header:

You can create quizzes using multiple choice questions, name inputs, email addresses, and HTML snippets.

Now we’re ready to release this quiz into the wild! Click on the blue, Finish & Share button:

Sharing your quiz

Polldaddy offers many ways to share your quiz. You can:

• use a pop-up to encourage participants to complete it,
• embed it into in your website,
• download our free iOS app and sync it to gather quiz completions in the field via your iPad,
• copy a direct link to share with others,
• embed it into an email message,
• post a link to it on Twitter,
• “like” it and post a link to it on Facebook, and/or
• embed it into a QR code and get a .png of the image to place in printed material.