Polldaddy

What it is

Polldaddy was an online polling and survey platform founded in Sligo, Ireland, in the mid-2000s and acquired in 2008 by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. For roughly a decade it was one of the most widely embedded poll widgets on the web, supplying reader polls to blogs, news sites, radio stations, and contest organizers who wanted a vote mechanism they could drop into any page with a snippet of JavaScript or a WordPress shortcode. In October 2018 Automattic rebranded the product as Crowdsignal, and polldaddy.com traffic now lands on crowdsignal.com.^[3] The old name has proven remarkably durable: it survives in archived contest rules, in embed codes on pages untouched since the rebrand, and in the WordPress plugin directory, where Automattic’s poll-and-rating plugin still lives under its original polldaddy slug.^[2]

In the context of online contests

Long before native social-media polls became the default, Polldaddy was a standard tool for self-hosted contest voting. Typical uses included:

• Media and community polls: “Vote for your favorite” features run by local newspapers, radio stations, and fan blogs, with the poll embedded directly in an article.
• Award shortlists: Industry and community awards that published a nominee list and let the public pick a winner through a single embedded poll.
• Blog-hosted competitions: WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites could insert a Polldaddy poll from the editor, which made it the path of least resistance for bloggers running photo contests, naming contests, and reader-choice votes.

Many of these contests still describe their voting step as “the Polldaddy poll” even though the widget that loads today is technically Crowdsignal. For anyone researching an older contest, the two names refer to the same underlying system.

Voting mechanics

Polldaddy’s mechanics carried over to Crowdsignal largely intact. A poll presents a fixed set of answer options; a participant selects one (or several, if the creator allows multiple answers) and submits. Key creator-side settings included:

• Repeat-vote handling: The creator chose between allowing repeat votes, blocking repeats with a browser cookie, or blocking with a combination of cookie and IP address — the strictest option available.
• Results visibility: Results could be shown immediately after voting, hidden entirely, or displayed as percentages only.
• Closing rules: Polls could be closed manually or scheduled to stop accepting votes at a set date and time.
• CAPTCHA: An optional challenge could be required before a vote was recorded, raising the cost of automated submission.

Polls ran either embedded in the organizer’s own page or on a hosted poll page reachable by direct link, which is how voting links were usually shared by email and social media.

Anti-fraud signals

The defenses in a Polldaddy-era poll were deliberately simple and entirely creator-configured. Cookie blocking stops only casual repeat voting, since clearing the browser cookie resets the limit. Adding IP-based blocking raises the bar, but it cuts both ways: voters who share a network — an office, a campus, or a mobile carrier using carrier-grade NAT — can be locked out after the first vote from that address. The optional CAPTCHA layer was the main defense against automated traffic. Beyond these, organizers relied on auditing: vote timing in the results report makes sudden bursts on a quiet poll easy to spot, and contest hosts frequently disqualified entries whose totals jumped in patterns inconsistent with their audience size.

For marketers

Polldaddy is now primarily a keyword rather than a product, and that has practical consequences. Search demand for the old name persists, so contest instructions, tutorials, and vote-acquisition queries such as “Polldaddy votes” continue to circulate years after the rebrand. When evaluating a contest that mentions Polldaddy, the operative questions are the same as for any Crowdsignal poll: which repeat-vote setting is active, whether a CAPTCHA gate is enabled, and whether results are public during voting. Public live results reward early momentum; cookie-only blocking makes totals volatile; cookie-plus-IP blocking makes vote pacing and network diversity the deciding quality factors. Campaign support for legacy-branded polls of this type is covered by the Polldaddy votes service, which operates on current Crowdsignal infrastructure — because that is what every “Polldaddy” poll actually runs on today.

Sources

1. Crowdsignal Support — Help Center: https://crowdsignal.com/support/
2. WordPress Plugin Directory — Crowdsignal Polls & Ratings (legacy polldaddy slug): https://wordpress.org/plugins/polldaddy/
3. Automattic — Company and Products: https://automattic.com/