Live demo: poll.nobloat.org

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A minimal alternative to Doodle, born out of frustration with it's ongoing enshiti*ion.

• Plain Go stdlib only, no dependencies (see go.mod), plus a little JavaScript and CSS
• One statically compiled binary, in the spirit of nobloat.org
• No node, npm, react/svelte/angular/vue or database

Features

• Create and ansswer polls without an account
• Optional mails via SMTP with personal links to manage a poll or change an answer
• GDPR friendly: each poll is one .json file
• Spam protection without CAPTCHAs with proof of work
• Admin (Basic Auth) can list and manage all polls
• Easy theming, with light and dark mode.
• Translations: English, German, French, Spanish

Non-features

• Scaling to millions of polls with thousands of participants voting at the same time

Screenshots

minimal

elegant

business

fun

Development

make dev          # Mailpit (mail UI on http://localhost:8025) + go run . (creates .env from .env.sample)
make test         # go vet + go test -race
make build        # static ./poll binary
make package      # Docker image ghcr.io/nobloat/poll:<git tag, or main>
make push         # package + push (TAG=… to override)
make screenshots  # all pages × themes × desktop/phone × light/dark (needs chromium + ImageMagick)

• Admin: http://localhost:8737/a (admin / admin)
• Example polls: an empty ./data gets the polls from seed/; rm -rf data resets them

Deployment

• Configure with environment variables; .env.sample documents every setting
• Listens on :8737 (PORT to change), stores polls in ./data (/data in the image)
• Startup validates the config; mail is queued on disk and retried after SMTP failures or restarts

mkdir data
docker run -d --restart unless-stopped --env-file .env --user 1000:1000 -v ./data:/data \
  -p 127.0.0.1:8737:8737 ghcr.io/nobloat/poll:latest

Or with Docker Compose:

services:
  poll:
    image: ghcr.io/nobloat/poll:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file: .env
    user: "1000:1000"
    volumes: [./data:/data]
    ports: ["127.0.0.1:8737:8737"]

Theming

• Built-in themes in static/themes/: minimal (default), elegant, business, fun
• THEME sets the default; each poll can pick its own in the poll form
• A theme is a small CSS file that overrides the :root variables in static/app.css (colors, font, borders, corners, shadows, buttons) and may refine any other rule
• Add one: put it in static/themes/<name>.css and rebuild, it's picked up automatically
• Use light-dark(light, dark) for colors
• Fonts: only the built-in generic families (system-ui, ui-monospace, ui-serif, ui-rounded, sans-serif, …), no font files

Translations

• All texts, including mails, are in i18n/: en.json, de.json, fr.json, es.json
• Add a language: copy en.json to <code>.json (e.g. it.json), translate the values (keep keys and %s placeholders), rebuild
• The language comes from the browser's Accept-Language, English is the fallback
• Mails use the language a participant had when they answered
• make test fails if a file is missing a key or has extra ones