How to use a poll bot on Discord

Discord serves many organizational purposes for groups of gamers, and while oftentimes just chatting about plans can do a reasonable job of mobilizing the masses, sometimes a poll is necessary for coordinating with your friends.

There are numerous ways to present a poll to your group of friends via Discord. Perhaps the most popular way to poll friends is to use popular websites like StrawPoll.me or a Google survey and provide a link in Discord to the poll.

But there are a few other ways to poll your friends through Discord without needing to use an external link from the application.

The first, and easiest, way to do so is to write a post for your friends with a question and request that they respond to the question with an emoji reaction that corresponds to a specific answer to the question.

For instance, you could ask “What day are you available?” From there, you could detail what different reactions to your post indicate. Then, as your friends react to your post, the reactions that correspond with the day of the week that most friends selected would win the poll.

While this isn’t necessarily automated, it’s not too much more work than what you would have to do if you were to use automation.

How to use a poll bot

Using a bot to create polls can be beneficial because it can sometimes make the polling of friends slightly quicker and appear neater than manually typing up a message that elicits a reaction.

There are numerous Discord polling bots that are perfectly serviceable and an abundance of them can be found on websites like top.gg, which is a hub for Discord bots. 

Among the more popular polling bots that you can invite to your server are Simple Poll, Easy Poll, and StrawPoll. There are also other more all-inclusive bots that have polling functions that are popular, including InviteManagement and Announce.

Related: How to add bots to a Discord server

After inviting a bot to your server and giving it permissions that allow it to function, typically they can be activated using a command like “/poll.” After typing the command, you will be prompted to type a question as well as type whatever response options you’d like to give.

Most of the time, these poll bots will give you a similar result to what you might be able to type up yourself manually, but using the bot itself could feel like it’s slightly less work depending on how complicated the poll is.

Ultimately, it’s up to any individual server owner to figure out what method they’d like to use for generating polls, but most of the automated options for polling friends in Discord aren’t particularly complex. They regularly can be replaced by the person polling taking a couple of extra seconds in typing out the reactions they’d like to associate with any given polling option.