MIT Poles

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  Home

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  Create Poll

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Inspiration

The idea started with a group chat we had with around 60 people in it. The idea was to add many people to the group chat in order to get a general consensus on an issue or topic. Groupme allows certain messages to be 'liked' and we would 'like' the answer we agreed with the most, essentially creating a poll. We had a lot of fun with the group chat and were inspired to make a version accessible to the entire MIT community.

What it does

At the moment we have a sign up page set up where a new user can enter some preliminary information including their kerberos. A verification email will then be sent to kerberos@mit.edu, verifying that the user is affiliated with MIT, and has an MIT email address. The verification email will contain a code should be entered on the site and allow the user to proceed to the site.

The homepage allows the user to choose to create a poll, which will be posted on the site. In order for a user to view the results of any poll, they must have answered the poll themselves.

How we built it

We built the website using bootstrap. We also created a locally hosted database with mySQL that contains all of the account information, question data and answer data. The site is also locally hosted.

Challenges we ran into

At first we tried hosting the site and the database on amazon web services, but didn't want to pay any money. We then eventually decided to move everything to a local host. It was a challenge to figure out the best host for the site and the database, and the overall structure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of our signup feature and the email verification system we set up. We also are proud of basically everything we've done since we came in with little to no knowledge of how to make a website from scratch.

What we learned

We learned about what a database was and how to make one. We learned how to send and retrieve information from that database. A lot of us were using PHP for the first time. We also learned how to set up a local server, and the pros and cons of different servers. We also learned how to use Bootstrap and integrate all of our different components together.

What's next for MIT Poles

We want to add new features such as a 'join group' feature that allows user to make subgroups and vote on issues with sub communities, choosing whether to remain anonymous or not.

We have code to show, but didn't have time to upload it all to a Bitbucket repo!

Built With

• bootstrap
• html
• javascript
• mysql
• php