I've finally been able to take a look at the new features added to the Leofinance Alpha and I love them both. I will most likely use them both in the long term. Obviously, I'll use search more often than polls, but that doesn't mean I won't use the latter.
Don't you hate it when the electricity goes down and it's not on your end, so all you have to do is wait for it to come up? Sure, the laptop still had some battery, but the internet was out. Now that I think about it, I could have gotten internet via the mobile connection. But I haven't thought about it then.
Anyway, that's a way to lose a couple of hours while trying to find something unplanned to do that doesn't need electricity.
So, after the electricity came back and I did some urgent tasks, I took a look at the new features Leofinance Alpha has added last night, probably after I wrapped up my day.
As I said in my first paragraph, I love both of them. Search is a highly necessary feature that helps someone find the content he or she is interested in much more quickly. The search is by author username and by tag, both discoverable in real-time as you type.
This search-by-tag new feature opens the door to using less popular tags, for niches, as #threads grows in usage.
When I check a new feature for the first time I always look for potential bugs.
I'm happy to say, that besides something that seemed to be a glitch that I wasn't able to reproduce, I haven't seen anything wrong with the search feature so far.
Regarding polls, I have a few more comments. I tried it first on the interface, before reading the announcement post.
My remark here is that before I read the post, I didn't know how to create a poll. After reading the post, the process is very simple.
What I would improve is to add titles to the buttons (aka tooltips in Windows). While the buttons for something like bold, italic, etc. are easy to identify visually, I didn't know the last one meant "Poll" until I read the post which showed how to create a poll.
This is my first and only poll created so far:
Polls are implemented using custom jsons and votes are permanent and cannot be changed. Also, votes are linked to the account casting them and the association is easy to check on the blockchain. Votes are assumed, not anonymous (unless you vote with an anonymous account). Voting is also 1 account 1 vote.
Stake doesn't count, at least in this first version. Maybe in a future version, there will be a way to restrict polls to users who have at least XXX LP or XXX HP.
What I'd also like to see for polls is a customizable deadline, after which the results are locked.
I am impressed by the fact both search and polls were released at the same time. Threads from Leofinance Alpha is shaping up to become a great platform for short-form content.