Are there any poll apps or macros which allow anonymous survey responses?

[Cirstyn Bech-Yagher]

Hi,

The header says it all, really. We'd like to run a set of surveys in a space accessible by anonymous users and it seems none of the apps I have tried from the marketplace allow this. 

Are there any who do, or does anyone know of a workaround? 

I've searched, but no luck so far so I thought I'd ask :) 

Thx, 

C

[Joachim Brechtel · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the macro from https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/195/survey-and-vote-macros allows you to restrict the persons who can view the result of a survey.

We are currently working on a new Confluence App "Dynamic Survey for Confluence". It is based on SurveyJS and supports anonymous responses among many other features.

You will find the App in our marketplace account [1] soon :)

Best, Joachim

[1] https://marketplace.atlassian.com/vendors/114/tng-technology-consulting-gmbh

[Cirstyn Bech-Yagher]

Thank you for your response. 
Making users SEE the poll results or not is not the issue. 
Allowing anonymous votes is. 
As my need is today or early next week, I wish you well with your future plans and will keep looking. 

[Christian Treubel [TNG]]

Hi,

the feature Joachim mentioned is available in dynamic survey macro in the paid part of Multivote&Enterprise Survey [1].

The votes get stored separately to the voters. So you users can still only vote once. You can find the documentation here [2]

Truly anonymous (so without an account) is not possible, as this has some other flaws. See Nics answers therefore.

Hope this helps :)

Best regards,
Christian

[1] https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1210786/multivote-enterprise-survey-confluence

[2] https://tngtech.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VOTE/pages/1960181761/Anonymous+Surveys

[Sergey Postnykh]

Looking few days, not brilliant, but https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212925/easy-forms-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview did it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm afraid a truly anonymous poll is essentially useless.  How can you stop it being gamed such that people can make multiple votes?

[Martin Trenker]

just because you can't trust your team mates does not mean this feature would be useless ;)

i don't know if I really need to go into details why anonymous votes are an essential part of democracy but I'd rather have a small risk of bad actors screwing up a vote than not allowing psychological safe voting's. i think this would go hand in hand with Atlassian's mentality, right? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, it's completely the opposite.  

Anonymous voting is absolutely not democratic unless your voters can be totally trusted (and with humans, that's unlikely if the group of voters is larger than a human's inner circle of trusted friends - less than 15ish). 

If you mean hidden ballot, then yes, that's democratic.  It anonymises who voted for what, but it is not anonymous because you know who could have voted and how many votes they could have used.

I can pretty much guarantee that your small risk of bad actors is not "small" when you've got more than a few dozen people able to vote.  

We did some analysis of voting patterns in one of the places I used to work (not Atlassian based).  Of 10,000 votes, we found over 50% had been cast by throwaway email accounts that had no other perceivable activity in our field and not one of them responded to a follow-up email.  A 50% failure rate in sock-puppets alone tells us the risk of bad actors is not small.

Truly anonymous surveys are a waste of time.

[Cirstyn Bech-Yagher]

Gee, people, all I wasinterested in, is a feature survey among users.
And I solved it by using Google Forms instead.
Next, we're storming the Bastille. Anonymously.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Except that you have no idea how many people may storm it.  I'm not sure one person who has access to a hundred and eleventy twelve email addresses might be a successful storm?

I think you need to think through the differences between public ballot, hidden ballot and anonymous ballot (only one of them is democratic, and google forms doesn't fall into that band unless you set it up to work a bit like Jira's vote system)

[Cirstyn Bech-Yagher]

I had an idea how many would use it. And I was right.
In any case - I am sure I should have waited for towering juggernauts such as yourselves to come up with a solution full of unicorns and rainbows, and which did not ask for access to the entire Confluence site as basic access I had to tweak, but I had no time for that, so instead of waiting around and following the debate above, I went with something that worked and gave me the data I needed, when I needed it.
Thank you for your valuable input though, I shall give it due consideration.