four and a half months since the last entry, and almost all of it quiet — this is the first thing i've shipped since april. two things went out today: book polls, which is the rest of this post, and dark mode, which needs about a sentence. it defaults to light, ignores your system setting on purpose, and remembers what you picked.
every time we want to decide on a book for the upcoming month we use a external form service like typeform. while that's great and all, it's ultimately friction and the goal of spoiler mark was always to have as little friction as possible when it came to the club reading and deciding on books. the way to fix that is obvious, build the feature into spoiler mark itself.
so now there's a poll panel in the club sidebar, under the timeline, and admins can start a poll straight from any upcoming month in that timeline. admins put candidates on the ballot, members vote, and the book with the most votes gets created and assigned to the month when the poll closes. candidates live on the poll itself rather than in the main books table, so whatever loses never touches the club's library — no half-suggested books cluttering things up just because someone floated them once. guests can vote by name too, same as chapter discussions already work, so nobody's locked out just for not signing in.
member suggestions ended up going in at the same time rather than later like i expected — admins can toggle whether members can add their own candidates, not just vote on a fixed list. what i haven't solved is the thing i was actually worried about: nothing stops a poll from ending up with fifteen books that nobody can be bothered to read through, let alone vote on. along with that, i'm thinking of having a period where suggestions are before the main ballot that way there are clear timelines for when suggestions come in, and that way a club doesn't have to worry about a suggestion coming in during the voting period and throwing off the numbers.
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