Ultimate Pollbot (@ultimate_pollbot)

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ State of the project ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️

The project is no longer actively maintained!

Two of the most important dependencies (sqlalchemy and python-telegram-bot) released major version updates that introduced significant changes to their APIs.

I'm no longer feeling comfortable with hosting this and I don't have the time or motivation to update those dependencies. Due to this, the "official" pollbot is now offline.

This project was super useful for many people, in the end there were about ~2 million all-time users on the "official" bot instance. All good things have to come to an end though.

If you started a successful fork of this repository that has been maintained over a longer period of time, feel free to contact me. I'll then point to your fork :).

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️

Introduction

Deciding where you and your friends are going for lunch today can be a real hassle... Or, for instance, deciding which games should be played at the next LAN-Party.

Since no other telegram poll/vote bot offered the full feature set my friends and I needed, I decided to write the ULTIMATE pollbot. A bot which combines all good features of all existing bots and even stuff beyond that.

Features

The Ultimate Pollbot delivers a full set of well-tested and battle proven features. It's capable of handling hundreds of voters for a single poll, while offering a high customizability and a wide range of different poll types to choose from.

Here is a list of the most important features:

Poll types

This bot has 6 different vote modi. Each mode is useful for various scenarios. Choose wisely.

• Single vote: User get a single vote to allot
• Doodle: Users can vote with yes, no and maybe for each option.
• Block vote: Users can vote without restriction, but only one vote per option.
• Limited vote: Each user gets X votes for distribution, but only one vote per option.
• Cumulative vote: Every user gets X votes they can distribute as they like.
• Unlimited votes (Also called the shopping list): Every user can vote as often as they like, pretty much like a distributed shopping list.

Anonymity settings

Polls can be configured to be anonymous, with the result that names of users are not visible. Polls can be made anonymous subsequently, but as soon as a poll is anonymous it stays that way forever!

Further it's possible to hide the results of the poll until it gets closed. As soon as such a poll is closed, the results will be visible. Beware!: such a poll cannot be reopened.

Poll Management

• Addition and removal of options
• Allow other users to add new options
• Polls can be closed
• Polls can be reopened unless the poll is configured to hide the results until it has been closed.
• Polls can be completely deleted, which means that all non-forwarded occurrences of the poll will be removed.
• Polls can be reseted (Delete all votes). Poll needs to be closed first
• Polls can be cloned (New poll with same options, but without votes). Poll needs to be closed first

Misc

• Internationalization
• Polls sync between groups in real time.
• Polls can be shared via link. This allows other users to spread the poll to arbitrary groups.
• A date picker for easier creation of poll options
• Specify a due date, at which the poll will be automatically closed.
• Activate notifications in chats to notify users that the poll will close soon.

Sorting and Appearance

• Results can be displayed in a detailed or summarized manner.
• The percentage bar in the vote message can be disabled.
• The bot allows to configure the sorting of the option list and the user list for each option.
• Users can be sorted by vote date or username. Options can be sorted by highest percentage, name or by the order they've been added.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sentry for providing the project with a sponsored plan (which has super generous quotas!).

Thanks to Lokalise for providing my projects with a free license for open-source development!

Thanks to the Turkish translator:

• cnpltdncsln

Thanks to the Polish translator:

• tszalbot

Thanks to all Italian translators:

• FedericoAntoniazzi
• LBindustries for providing italian translations.

Thanks to all Spanish translators:

• balboag
• davidgfnet
• Miguel Antunez

Thanks to all Brazilian Portuguese translators:

• gui258
• Leonardo Frazao

Thanks to all German translators:

• Thorsten Schlaberg
• KnorpelSenf

Thanks to the Catalan translator:

• davidgfnet

Thanks to the Czech translator:

• Ignac (IgnacRR)

Commands

/start          Start the bot
/settings       Open the user settings menu
/create         Create a new poll
/list           List all active polls and manage them
/list_closed    List all closed polls and manage them
/notify         Activate notifications in a external chats
/help           Display the help

Installation and Starting

Dependencies:

• Poetry to manage and install dependencies.
• Just for convience.
• Ultimate Pollbot uses Postgres. Make sure the user has write/read rights. You can use the provided docker-compose file to set up a local development environment.

1. Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:nukesor/ultimate-poll-bot pollbot && cd pollbot

1. Execute just setup to install all dependencies.
2. Either start the poll bot once with just run or copy the pollbot.toml manually to ~/.config/pollbot.toml and adjust all necessary values. On Windows, the tilde (~) will substitute to your home directory, usually at C:\Users\your.name\.config\pollbot.toml.
3. Run just initdb to initialize the database (or recreate it, if necessary) and set the migration stamp to the newest alembic head.
4. Start the bot by running just run.

Upgrading the Database

This is how you upgrade:

1. Stop the bot
2. git pull
3. poetry run alembic upgrade head to run migrations on your database
4. Start the bot

Botfather Commands

start - Start the bot
stop - Stop the bot
delete_me - Remove me from the bot. Forever
settings - Open the user settings menu
create - Create a new poll
cancel - Cancel poll creation
list - List all active polls and manage them
list_closed - List all closed polls and manage them
notify - Activate notifications in external chats
help - Show the help text