Frequently Asked Questions

Ferendum is a website or online application that allows you to create two types of online polls:

• Anonymous polls
• Tables of Votes (each participant can choose their preferred option in a non-anonymous way)

Each voting page is called “a Ferendum” and has its own address (link or URL). The creator of the Ferendum has to send the link to the participants by email, social media, WhatsApp, Telegram or post it on a website or forum.

They are online polls about any subject. For each option (possible answer), the number and percentage of votes and a color bar proportional to the number of votes are shown.
They are commonly used for polling opinion on any subject in an anonymous way.

An example of "Anonymous Polls" can be seen below

The “Tables of Votes” are Ferendums in which the preferred options for each participant are shown in a table.

The Tables of Votes are usually used as a way of reaching a common agreement in a group of people (for example, which restaurant to go to or the date when everybody is available for a meeting).

An example of "Tables of Votes" can be seen below

The Private Votes do not appear in the list of Public Polls and cannot appear as a result of searches in Google or other search engines. Nevertheless, any person that knows the voting link can see it and participate. Usually, these are people to whom you have sent the address by email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp or by any other means. Bear in mind that these people can also send the link to others.

The Public Polls are shown in the Ferendum’s list of public polls and anyone can see them and participate.

Select the option "Require identification using one of these accounts" and then select one single type of account (e.g., only Google or only Facebook). In this way, each person is identified and the system will only allow him/her to vote once. We will also simultaneously use other techniques to prevent people with more than one account from voting more than once.

If you use a different configuration, we will also try to prevent people from voting more than once, but we cannot guarantee that no one manages to vote twice.

You have to select the following two configuration options:

1. Select “Table of Votes” instead of “Anonymous Polls”. Otherwise, the system could mistake different people from the same network for the same person and could prevent them from voting.
2. Select “Allow participating without an account”. In this way, any person, even if they do not use social networks, will be able to participate and will be able to do it faster.

With this configuration, you make sure that no one has any problem voting, but in turn, we will relax the mechanism to ensure that no one votes twice so that we cannot fully guarantee that someone could manage to vote twice.

It can be due to one of these reasons:

1. If the Ferendum is configured as “Anonymous poll”, perhaps you will not be able to vote if you are connected through the same network as other voters. This can happen if other people are voting from the same company, university or shared WiFi. In these cases, if we are not sure if a user is the same as a previous user, we prevent them from voting to avoid abuses. In the “Tables of Votes” this does not happen because we reduce (but do not eliminate) the anti-fraud mechanisms since we consider that usually there is no interest in manipulating the results.
2. It could also mean that someone has already voted from the same computer or device.

You have to select one of these options:

• Anonymous Poll
• Table of Votes (non-anonymous Poll)

The Anonymous Polls are adequate for anonymous voting. The Table of Votes are adequate when you want to know the preferred choice of each person (for instance to schedule the date of an event).

You have to select one of these options:

• Private Poll
• Public Poll

The Public Polls are posted in the list of public polls in the Ferendum homepage and anyone can see them and participate. Private polls can only be seen by people that know its URL address (link) because you sent it to them or post it in a web page or social network.

You have to select one of these options:

• Allow voting one option only
• Allow voting more than one option

Select whether the voter can choose only one option/answer or as many as he wants.

You have to select one of these options:

• Allow participation without an account
• Require identification using one of these accounts

Asking the participants to authenticate using a user account in a social network or Google increases the guaranties that no one votes twice and the identity of authors of the comments is checked. If you do not ask the participants to use an account we will use alternative means to try to avoid anyone to vote more than once.

You have to select one of these options:

• Do not allow participants to add new options
• Allow participants to add new options until the end of dd-mm-yyyy and vote afterwards
• Always allow adding new options

Here you can configure whether or not the participants in the poll can add new options.

You can select this option:

• Show Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and e-mail buttons

If this option is checked the Facebook, Twitter and other social network buttons will be shown.

You have to select one of these options:

• Do not allow comments
• Allow comments

Here you can choose if the participants can post comments or not.

Use IP address to prevent dishonest votes?
You have to select one of these options:

• Let Ferendum decide
• Do not allow voting more than once from the same IP (Ferendum will use it together with other techniques)
• Allow voting more than once from the same IP (ferendum will use other techniques)

In Ferendum we use simultaneously several techniques to prevent participants from voting more than once. One of them is not to permit voting more than once from the same IP address. If you are distributing the poll among people that are within the same network (for example inside the same company or university) and you do not want anyone to have problems for voting, we recommend you to choose ‘Allow voting more than once from the same IP’. If you are distributing the poll through social networks or webs and you want more guarantees that no one votes more than once we recommend you to choose ‘Do not allow voting more than once from the same IP’. In this second case the provability from two persons sharing the same IP is very low. If you do not know what to do select ‘Let Ferendum decide’.

Table of votes specific configuration
Can participants delete or modify their votes?
You have to select one of these options:

• No
• Yes

Here you can choose if the participants can delete or change their vote or not. You can also choose that votes can only be deleted/modified if the participant is the last to have voted so far. If you choose that the votes cannot be deleted bear in mind that users will not be able to correct errors. These options are only for ‘Tables of Votes’. In ‘Anonymous Polls’ the participants can never delete or modified their votes.

Anonymous Poll specific configuration
Show Results?
You have to select one of these options:

• After voting
•    Show 'See results' link?
• Before voting
• Only the administrator will know the results

You can choose here if the results are visible before voting, after voting or only to the administrator (poll creator). If you choose 'after voting' and you check the checkbox 'Show link' the results will not be visible before voting but there will be a link to see them.

In the “Anonymous Polls” it is not possible, since we consider there are no reasons for it.

In the “Table of Votes”, usually each participant can change their own vote and after that, he/she can vote again. However, the change and the previous vote will always be recorded and all participants will be able to see what the previous vote was. Deleting the vote is useful to correct errors or when the poll has been used, for example, to select the day of a meeting and the availability of a person has changed. Nevertheless, if the web browser is configured to delete or not accept cookies, it will not be possible to delete the votes.

The administrator (creator of the poll) cannot delete or modify votes except for their own.

Yes.
The administrator (poll creator) has access to an administration page where it is possible to edit the configuration settings or finish the voting, but they cannot manipulate the results.

No.
The administrator (poll creator) cannot change the results.

Yes.
We are continually improving Ferendum and we are looking forward to getting comments from users about how to improve the service. Please, send us your comments.