Pollmark documentation

Get started

Install Pollmark from the Atlassian Marketplace (Confluence admin). Every site gets a 30-day free trial. After that it is $4 a month for up to 10 users, then billed per user.
Edit a page or blog post, type / and choose Pollmark poll.
Fill in the macro settings: the question, the options (one per line), and how people vote. Settings are described below.
Publish the page. Anyone who can view the page and is logged in can vote.

While you are editing, the poll shows a preview with the note Voting opens when the page is published. A poll that has no options yet shows New poll with a reminder to add a question and options.

Set up a poll

These are the fields in the Pollmark poll macro settings:

Question: up to 300 characters.
Options, one per line (up to 50): each line is one option, up to 200 characters. Bullets or numbers at the start of a line are removed. Options that differ only in capitals or spacing ("Friday" and "friday ") count as one option, and the duplicate is dropped.
Voters pick: One option or Several options.
Most options a voter can pick (several options only, blank for no limit): for example 3 for "pick up to 3". Ignored for one-option polls.
Show results: Always, After the person votes, or When the poll closes.
Close voting after (end of day, UTC): an optional closing date. Voting stays open until 23:59:59 UTC on that day. Leave it empty for no deadline.
Anonymous: votes are stored without account IDs, so nobody can see who voted for what: off by default.
Named polls: show voter names to everyone who can see the results (off: only people who can edit the page see names, in Manage): off by default. Has no effect on anonymous polls.
Let people change or remove their vote while the poll is open: on by default.

If something in the settings can't be used as entered (an option or question that is too long, a duplicate option, more than 50 options, or a closing date that isn't a real date), Pollmark adjusts it and lists what it changed under About this poll's options in Manage.

Voting

One-option polls show radio buttons; several-option polls show checkboxes. A poll with a limit shows "pick up to" the number in its header, and a poll without one shows "pick any".
Click Vote. Your choice is marked with a Your vote label in the results.
If the poll allows it, Change my vote opens the form again with your current choice (click Save my vote, or Cancel), and Remove my vote takes your vote back.
If the poll doesn't allow changes, you see Votes are final in this poll.
The header shows Open or Closed, an Anonymous label for anonymous polls, the closing date, and the number of voters. The voter count is always shown, even when results are hidden.
You need to be logged in to vote. Each person has one vote per poll.

Results

Each option shows its votes, its percentage of voters, and a bar. The leading option is in bold. Percentages are of people who voted, so in a several-option poll they can add up to more than 100%.

When results are hidden, the poll says Results appear after you vote. or Results appear when the poll closes. With After the person votes, everyone can see results once the poll closes.

In a named (not anonymous) poll, voter names are private to page editors by default: everyone sees the counts, and people who can edit the page see who picked each option under Who voted in Manage (and in the CSV export). To let every reader see names, turn on Named polls: show voter names to everyone who can see the results; readers then get Show who voted under each option whenever results are visible. If even page editors should not know who picked what, make the poll anonymous.

Anonymous polls

An anonymous poll never stores account IDs. For each voter, Pollmark stores a one-way code made from the account ID and a random value unique to that poll. The code only lets Pollmark recognize that the same person is voting again in that poll. Nobody, including page owners, site admins and Great Work, can see who picked what. The CSV export of an anonymous poll has totals only.

Anonymity locks at the first vote. If you turn Anonymous on or off after people have voted, the poll keeps the setting it started with, and Manage shows Anonymity is locked. To switch, export a CSV if you need a record, then use Reset results. With no votes left, the new setting applies.

Manage a poll

Click Manage on a published poll. People who can edit the page (or blog post) get these controls; everyone else sees Only people who can edit this page can close, reopen, reset or export this poll.

In a named poll that keeps voter names private, Manage also shows the results with Who voted (only people who can edit this page see names).

Close now: closes voting immediately, before any deadline.
Reopen: opens a closed poll again, even after its closing date.
Follow the deadline again: shown after you close or reopen by hand. It removes the manual setting so the closing date decides again.
Export CSV: see below.
Reset results: asks Reset this poll? and, after Delete all votes, removes every vote on the poll. This can't be undone.

When the poll hides results from voters, Manage shows Results so far (only editors see these before they are shown), so editors can check progress without voting.

If you remove or rename an option after people voted for it, those votes are not counted, and Manage tells you how many went to options that were since removed or renamed.

Export results to CSV

Manage > Export CSV opens the CSV in a window. Select all, copy, and paste it into a spreadsheet, or save it as a .csv file. It contains:

the question, number of voters, status (open or closed) and whether the poll is anonymous,
each option with its votes and percent of voters, plus a line for votes on removed options if there are any,
for named polls only, one row per voter: display name, account ID, choices, and the time of the vote (UTC).

Only page editors can export. Cells that start with characters a spreadsheet would treat as a formula are made safe.

Copies and templates

A poll belongs to its page and its place on that page. When you copy a page, copy a page tree, or create a page from a template that contains a poll, the new page gets its own empty poll with the same question and options. The original poll and its votes are not affected. You can put several polls on one page; each one is separate.

Poll rollup

Add Pollmark poll rollup to a page to list polls in one table. Its settings:

Heading: defaults to "Polls".
Which polls: This page and the pages under it or Everywhere in this space.
Status: Open and closed, Open only, or Closed only.

The table shows Page (a link), Question, Status, Voters and Leading. Open polls are listed first. Leading shows "No votes yet" when nobody has voted, and respects each poll's results setting: "Vote to see" or "Hidden until closed" when the reader can't see results yet. Ties show every leading option.

Each reader only sees polls on pages they can open. Export CSV on the rollup gives the same rows plus the closing date and whether each poll is anonymous.

Export the page to PDF or Word

When a page is exported, each poll becomes its question followed by a results table (option, votes, percent) and the voter count, as long as the person exporting can see the results. Otherwise the export lists the options and says when results appear.

Convert polls migrated from Data Center

Polls built with the Data Center Survey and Vote Macros app show up as unsupported macros after a move to Cloud. To convert them:

Open the space, go to Space settings and choose Pollmark Data Center polls.
Pollmark lists the pages in the space that still contain Data Center vote or survey macros, with each poll's question and number of choices.
Click Convert on a page. Each vote macro on it becomes a Pollmark poll with the same question and choices, and you see how many were converted.

How the settings carry over: each converted poll is one-option, shows results always, and has no deadline. A vote that showed voter names on Data Center becomes a named poll; otherwise it becomes anonymous. A vote that did not allow changing votes keeps votes final.

Things to know:

Votes cast on Data Center are not part of the migrated page, so converted polls start empty.
survey macros (several questions) are listed but not converted. Rebuild each question as its own Pollmark poll.
The conversion is saved as you, as a normal page edit, so you need permission to edit the page. You can roll it back from page history.
If someone changes the page while it converts, you are asked to run the conversion again.
Pollmark checks up to 50 pages per visit, and only pages (not blog posts).

Removing a poll from a page

Deleting a poll macro from a page doesn't delete its votes straight away. When the page is published without the macro, Pollmark marks that poll as removed. If the macro is back within 7 days (you undo the change, or restore an earlier page version from page history), the mark is cleared and every vote is kept. After 7 days without the macro, a daily cleanup deletes the poll and its votes. Export a CSV first if you want a record.

Pollmark only deletes votes after it has read the page and confirmed the macro is gone. Polls on pages it can't read (for example a page in the trash) are left alone.

Licensing and trials

Pollmark is paid through Atlassian, with a 30-day free trial. It is $4 a month for 1 to 10 users, then billed per user in graduated bands starting at $0.90 per user per month from user 11. Annual billing is 10 times the monthly price.

If the license is not active, each poll shows Pollmark is not licensed on this site, so voting, poll management and CSV export are paused. Results stay visible. Polls and their results stay on the page, page editors still see results in Manage, and the rollup table still lists polls. Voting, changing or removing a vote, closing, reopening, resetting, CSV export (from a poll or the rollup) and converting Data Center polls are refused with a message to ask a Confluence admin to renew the app. The removed-poll cleanup keeps running.

Permissions and data

Pollmark runs on Atlassian's Forge platform and sends nothing to any outside server. The app has no external network permissions and no remote backend.
Polls and votes are stored in the app's Forge SQL database for your site. For each poll: the page id, space key, the macro's id on the page, the poll settings, whether it is anonymous, a random per-poll value for anonymous voter codes, any manual close or reopen and who did it, and timestamps. For each vote: the options picked, when, and either the voter's account ID (named polls) or the one-way code (anonymous polls).
Pollmark does not store names, email addresses or page content.
Confluence requests from the poll, the rollup and the converter are made as the signed-in person, so Confluence's own permissions apply: checking whether you can edit the page (for Manage and voter names), finding which pages you can see (for the rollup), looking up display names (for a named poll's CSV), and reading and saving pages in the Data Center converter.
The one exception is the removed-poll cleanup. When a page or blog post with polls is updated, and once a day for polls already marked as removed, the app reads that page's body as the app, only to check which poll macros are still on it. Nothing from the page is stored.
Votes stay until someone removes their own vote, an editor resets the poll, the poll's macro has been gone from its page for 7 days, or the app is uninstalled.

Limits and known gaps

Up to 50 options per poll, 200 characters per option, 300 characters for the question.
Closing dates are whole days and end at 23:59:59 UTC. There is no time-of-day setting.
Anyone who can view the page can vote. To limit who votes or who sees results, use page restrictions.
In named polls, voter names are visible to page editors, and to everyone only if the poll turns that on. Page restrictions decide who counts as an editor.
Renaming an option is treated as removing it and adding a new one; votes for the old wording are no longer counted.
A removed poll keeps its votes, and can still show in the rollup, for up to 7 days after the page is published without it (so undo works). A poll on a page that is trashed or deleted is not cleaned up until the app is uninstalled.
The rollup reads the 500 most recently active polls in a space and shows up to 200 rows. When it hits the limit it says Showing the 500 most recently active polls in this space.
A copied page's poll is created the first time someone opens the copy.
One question per poll. There is no ranked choice, comments per option, or reminders.
The CSV opens in a window for you to copy; there is no file download button.

FAQ

I copied a page and the poll still showed the old votes. Does that happen here? No. Every copy, every page in a copied tree, and every page made from a template gets its own empty poll.

Can I use a poll in a template? Yes. Put a Pollmark poll in a template or blueprint, and each page created from it has a separate poll with the same question and options.

Is anonymous really anonymous? Yes. Anonymous polls store no account IDs at all, only a one-way code per voter, and a poll can't be switched to named once people have voted.

How many options can I have? Up to 50.

Will several polls slow the page down? Each poll loads with one small request to the app's own database, without extra Confluence calls when the page is viewed, so a page with several polls still opens quickly.

Can I see results without voting? If you can edit the page, yes: open Manage. Everyone else sees results as the poll's Show results setting allows.

We moved from Data Center and our vote macros show as unsupported. Can you fix them? Yes. Use Space settings > Pollmark Data Center polls to convert them into Pollmark polls with the same question and choices. Old votes don't come across, because they are not in the migrated page.

Who can close or reset a poll? Only people who can edit the page or blog post it is on.

Who can see who voted? In an anonymous poll, nobody. In a named poll, people who can edit the page, in Manage and the CSV. Turn on Named polls: show voter names to everyone who can see the results to show names to every reader.

I deleted a poll by mistake. Are the votes gone? Not for 7 days. Undo the edit or restore the previous version from page history, and the poll comes back with its votes.

Uninstalling and your data

When the app is uninstalled, Atlassian deletes Pollmark's stored polls and votes for your site. Export any results you want to keep first. Pages converted from Data Center stay as they are and keep their page history.

Support

Open a request in the Great Work support portal (linked from the Marketplace listing) or email hello@greatwork.company. First response within 1 business day.