I should say that I'm generally speaking a big fan of the polls functionality on LinkedIn. They provide you with some good demographics on the voters in the poll and make it easy to embed into your site and share with others via social media.
However, they also come with a pretty major flaw. We've been running a poll for the last week and it has done well in gaining plenty of votes and user interaction. We're currently at 549 votes and 89 comments, which is great.
The problem is that the poll has attracted a couple of trolls that have a clear dislike for the topic of the poll and are intent on disrupting the discussions in whatever way they can. Their latest tactic has been to swear in various foreign languages. It's all pretty childish stuff and I'd come to expect a bit more from LinkedIn users. After all, everyone there is named, and that simple premise is usually enough to dissuade people from acting too anti-socially. Sadly not in this instance though.
It wouldn't be a problem if the same moderating functionality existed on polls as they do in groups. They could either be banned by the group owner, or if enough users flag their comments they would be banned democratically. That would be absolutely lovely. Unfortunately however, on polls you can't do any of that. There is no mechanism for the poll starter to delete comments made on their poll. You can flag comments but there is no pre-defined trigger after which the user is removed. Thus far I'm aware that over 20 people haev flagged the comments made by these individuals, yet they still remain. Suffice to say that emails to LinkedIn have so far gone un-answered.
All in all it's a very frustrating experience and one that's causing us to reassess whether we use LinkedIn to create polls in future. After all it's not like there are a shortage of free apps available that do broadly similiar things. I've used PollDaddy before for instance and it's worked well, but of course they don't offer the ability for users to comment. Sticking with LinkedIn would be ideal, but when we're running polls for clients, having trolls turn up and be a nuisance is far from ideal.
Sorry to hear that Adi, it's always a pain when you have some people acting up. As you say, you'd think LinkedIn would be above all that because it's a professional network and people have their names associated with everything. Guess if people really want to be idiots they'll find a way.
It is very sad. These were two middle aged men acting like children. Just fustrating that LinkedIn provided no tools to deal with it.
I'm not at all surprised that LinkedIn haven't responded to you, nor that there are trolls out there, but it is very odd that no moderating tools exist for you to clean things up yourself.
Hi Tim, welcome to the blog. It is a really odd oversight. The technology is clearly there as it exists in Groups, just not in polls. Very strange.
Just had an email from one of the product support guys at LinkedIn. Turns out he found the blog and will now clean up the poll. Great that he found the blog and it's getting dealt with now, but a bit odd that all the requests via the official support channels didn't do anything.
Good that it's sorted out now Adi, but yeah very weird that they do things after reading a blog but not after seeing complaints through their own systems.
Hi Adi
I'm going through the same issue at them moment with a poll with 2 commentators having a war with each other.
Can you point me in the right direction?
Cheers
Jovan
Hi Jovan. Unfortunately LinkedIn don't provide any help with this issue. I ended up having to go through their support system and even then they were not able to remove the comments. Very frustrating.
Thanks Adi,
The only thing that has saved my poll is that these peole found it later rather than sooner. If they had discovered it at the begining of the process I would have been forced to cancel. Now I know for next time. Cheers.
Glad it was ok in the end Jovan. Do leave some feedback with LinkedIn though as the more people that complain, the quicker they'll hopefully do something about it.