It has been an interesting few months for ClearPoll. We’ve launched the alpha on Android and iOS and have received amazing feedback. With over 3,500 users and hundreds of polls created already, the future looks brighter than ever. We can see that people are using ClearPoll for fun, by choice, which is a great sign.

We’ve got some new features to announce!

Introducing ClearPoll Ratings: An awesome new “widget” that allows anyone to create a simple star ratings bar for their website. This will be the first ever decentralised ratings system easily integrated into any website or article. Users will be able to create the ratings bar within the ClearPoll app, and then display it on their website easily in the form of a 1 through 10 clickable star rating:

★★★★★★★★☆☆

Rate products, stories, anything at all — and it totally solves multiple ratings or bot ratings which are a huge problem. ClearPoll ratings greatly expands our market, as in order to rate an article, you must be connected to ClearPoll.

Another great new feature is a new “live” ClearPoll home screen.

This will show most popular polls, trending polls, recommended polls and more. It will showcase a constantly changing collection of awesome polls to vote on and let the users understand more about what others are doing within the app. It will showcase popular polls, giving great exposure and earning huge rewards for the user who created it. If you are familiar with Google Play Store in how it showcases apps in various collections (trending, most popular, suggested, categories etc) this will give you some idea of the direction we are taking it. It’s all about fresh, seemingly endless content.

We are also removing the topic voting system entirely.

In theory, the topic voting system works well. In practice, it is a little frustrating having to wait 24 hours for a poll to become active. The whole idea of topic voting was for quality control. Since then, we introduced User Rewards, in which users earn points for every vote their poll receives. That is a far better way to control quality, as the greatest polls will rise to the top and it’s not so much about focusing on the bad ones. We are also going to introduce a flagging system which will enable users to flag a poll as offensive, instantly hiding the poll from that user and sending us a notification to review it. We must keep in mind that what is offensive to some, may not be for others, and it may still be a valid poll question. If we review a flagged poll and it is clearly an attempt to offend others or troll, we may hide it from all users.

So, instead of all users reviewing all topics (and still being offended) we have decided to bypass that 24 hour process and allow flagging instead of downvoting. Users will be able to create a poll instantly and not have to wait before asking people to go and vote. We also found that some users were confused about the difference between topics and polls — so that will be solved too. This change will be rolled out in a future alpha update.

The Current State of the Market

As you all know, the current market is providing a real challenge to any projects looking to grow and flourish. ICOs are not selling out, development updates are not having the effect they once did, marketing has limited effect and launches are not generating interest. A bearish market affects more than just price. It affects mood and response. Confidence is down across the board but most agree that this is just a temporary pause in what will soon be a booming market again.

After carefully considering this, we have made the decision to extend the launch date of ClearPoll. This is done with your interests in mind. Launching in May means most likely launching in a bear market . We feel that as token holders, you will benefit from launching later in the year, giving us several months of optimism and excitement as a lead up, as opposed to the current mood which does not lend itself to growth (price-wise or as a community).

So with this in mind, pushing back the launch means we are actually now able to deliver a better product including brand new features. We’re able to continue testing more thoroughly as well as include all features on launch date, not leaving any for future updates.

The new launch will be in August.

We hope you understand that this is a big picture decision. Our CoinMarketCap advertising will still go ahead as planned on March 28, as that advertises POLL tokens, not specifically the ClearPoll product. ClearPoll pre-launch marketing will be slightly pushed back to ensure maximum interest levels right on launch date. This includes the new pre-launch website. Rest assured, we are not having a break at all, the new launch date allows us to be more productive than ever and we will constantly be releasing news and working hard on marketing and business development (we’ve got some big things coming, by the way!). You may recall that August was actually our original launch date.

We are working very hard behind the scenes on business development. Partnerships and endorsements are imminent. We are unable to be more specific at this time (which is a little frustrating!) but rest assured, big things are coming and moving the launch to a more positive time in the market is going to benefit our followers greatly, as well as give us more time to really make ClearPoll become the platform of choice for sharing public opinion.

Every decision we make is as a result of alpha testing or general feedback. ClearPoll is not a community project or open source, but the backbone of the entire project is still you — the user. Without you, we have nothing.

– Daniel Abela, ClearPoll Co-Founder