This article pertains to our Polls offering for select Ads-Supported publishers. To see if you qualify for this product, please write to us at publisher-success@disqus.com. For Custom Polling options with the ability to create your own questions and answers, please see our Disqus Polls documentation here.

For qualifying Ads-Supported publishers, Disqus is now offering an additional tool for audience engagement - Auto-Generated Polls.

When enabled, this will create Polls that appear above your Comments embed, with auto-generated questions and answers based on your forum category. There is no need to input any content, or do any poll management. You'll also have the option to enable Contextual Polls, which will generate Polls directly based on your site's article content, rather than your forum category.
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Auto-Generated Polls are only available to qualifying Ads-Supported publishers, and will appear with an adjacent ad placement above the Disqus Comments. To see if you qualify for this product, please write to us at publisher-success@disqus.com.
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Once you've been approved, you will be able to enable the Polls from the Polls Settings Page in your admin.

You'll also have the option here to enable Contextual Polls. This option prioritizes creating Polls based on the content of your site's articles, and falls back to category-based when necessary. Contextual Polls will give you the Polls that are most relevant to your site content and community. The variety and volume of available Contextual Polls is based on how frequently new article content is posted.
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If you choose to run auto-generated Polls on the default category setting, you'll want to ensure that your forum category is up to date, as this is what those Polls will base their content on. You may update your forum category from the General Settings page in your admin.

Once Polls have been enabled by checking one or both checkboxes on this page, new auto-generated Polls will begin appearing above your Comments embeds, typically within 30 minutes. To disable Polls, simply ensure that both boxes on the Polls Settings Page are unchecked.
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When enabled, Polls will appear with an ad unit above the Comments embed. The Polls unit is responsive to the width of the Disqus embed, and will widen or narrow as necessary to remain centered above the comments with the size of the joining ad unit.
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If Reactions are also enabled, Polls will appear above the Reactions options. Polls can only appear above the Comments in this location, so if Recommendations is also enabled in the top position along with Polls, then Recommendations will automatically be moved below the Comments embed. It is not currently possible to reverse these placements, or show auto-generated Polls below the comments or in the middle of a comments thread.

We'll automatically pull the link color from your site's theme, and use this color for the poll Answers options and the Previous and Next buttons.
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To manually change what color is used for this, you may add a version of the following to your CSS sheet:
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​.disqus_polls a {

color: blue;

}

When a user is taking Polls, all they need to do is click their response to the question, and the unit will submit this as their answer automatically. They will then be shown the results of that Poll for 5 seconds before the next Poll loads. They may click the Next button to proceed to next poll immediately, or click the Previous button to view the results of all the Polls they've taken in this unit.

No, Polls is a free-to-use product for sites that are running ads and are qualified for this unit. To see if you are qualified to run this Polls unit, please email us at publisher-success@disqus.com.
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The paid Polls plan on the Subscription and Billing page only applies to the ability to run Disqus Polls, our Custom Polling unit that allows the publisher to set the questions and answers manually.

Polls is only configured to appear above the Comment embed.
When Recommendations is enabled in the top position and Polls is enabled, Polls will appear above the comments, and Recommendations will automatically adjust to appear below the comments. It is not possible to customize these placements at this time.

Polls are generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI). When contextual polls are enabled, Disqus uses the page content solely to create a poll relevant to that content. This process is handled by a private AI model instance dedicated to poll generation. Importantly, there is:

No External Sharing: Your data is never sent to any public or third-party AI service.

No Model Training: The content used for poll generation is not retained or used to train AI models.