Live events

A live event is a presenter session. You prepare a list of questions, share a short join code, and open the questions one at a time while the audience answers on their phones. No account is needed to take part.

Live events live in the dashboard under Polls, at /poll-events.

Create an event

Choose New event and set:

• Event name.
• Enable audience Q&A and Review every question before it is shown.
• Participant limit - up to 1,000 people can join one event.
• Language of the event pages - English, German, or follow each visitor's browser.
• Presentation mode theme - light, dark, or high contrast (see Presentation mode).

Every event gets a six-character join code and a join link. People open the link or type the code at /e/{code}.

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Question formats

Add questions in the console. Each one has a format:

Every result has a table next to it. The bars and the cloud are a visual aid; the table holds the same numbers as text, so nothing depends on colour or size alone.

How word clouds count

Answers are normalised before they are counted, and the same input always gives the same word:

1. Unicode compatibility form (NFKC), so full-width and ligature forms match.
2. Full case folding, so "Straße", "STRASSE" and "strasse" are one word.
3. Control and invisible characters become spaces; runs of spaces collapse.
4. Punctuation around a word is trimmed ("great!!!" and "(great)" are "great"); punctuation inside stays ("e-mail").
5. Words are split on new lines, commas and semicolons. Spaces do not split, so "machine learning" is one term. A word repeated in one answer counts once.

There is no built-in list of words to ignore. Add your own under Words to ignore.

Quizzes

• Mark one or more options as correct. A participant who picks any of them is correct.
• Set the points for a correct answer, and optionally a speed bonus: faster correct answers score up to twice as much as an answer at the deadline.
• Add a time limit. The server decides when time is up. A late answer is refused with a clear message, and a participant's own clock can never extend voting or change a score.
• The correct answers are not sent to anyone's browser until you reveal the question.
• Participants with the same score share a rank (1, 2, 2, 4). Order inside a tie follows the join number, so a leaderboard always renders the same way.

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Run the event

Open the event and use the Controls:

1. Start event.
2. Open first question (then Open next question). Use Open next to a question to jump to it.
3. Close voting. A timed question closes by itself at its deadline and every connected screen updates.
4. Reveal results. The audience sees the results and, for a quiz, the correct answers.
5. End event when you are done.

You can also switch the leaderboard and audience questions on and off at any time.

Refreshing the page or reconnecting never loses your place: the console and the audience page reload the current question from the server.

Two people running one event

Every control sends the version of the event that the screen last showed. If a colleague changed the event in the meantime, your action is not applied. You see the latest state and a message, and can repeat the action if it still makes sense.

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Roles

The Presenter role is meant for a colleague or guest host who should run the session without being able to change your content. For API and MCP tokens, the matching ability is polls:present. A token with polls:write can also run events.

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Audience questions (Q&A)

With Q&A on, participants can ask a question, anonymously or with a name. Each question starts in a review queue unless you turned approval off.

• Approve shows a question to the audience. Hide removes it. Mark answered keeps it visible as answered. Back to review undoes a decision.
• Questions that contain a word from the language filter always wait for a human, even when approval is off. The filter covers English and German by default, and you can add words per event. It flags text; it never deletes anything.
• Pending and hidden questions are never shown to the audience, never broadcast and never exported. The audience, the question export and the results only ever contain questions you approved or answered.
• Two moderators cannot overwrite each other: a decision is only applied if the question is still in the state the moderator saw.
• Every decision is recorded in the moderation log with who did it and when.
• Upvotes are counted once per participant, also after a reconnect.

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Privacy and limits

• Participants are identified only by a random token kept in their own browser. There is no device fingerprinting. That means duplicate protection for anonymous participants is best effort: someone who clears their browser data or switches device can take part again. The audience page says so.
• You can export participants (with quiz scores), the questions the audience could see, and every question's results as CSV from the console.

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Language

The audience page, the console and presentation mode are available in English and German. If the event sets a language, that language is used. Otherwise the visitor's browser language decides, and ?lang=de or ?lang=en on the join link overrides it.

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API and MCP

Everything in the console is available programmatically:

• REST: GET/POST /api/v1/poll-events, GET /api/v1/poll-events/{event}, POST /api/v1/poll-events/{event}/polls (add a question), POST /api/v1/poll-events/{event}/actions (start, open, next, close, reveal, leaderboard, qna, end), the Q&A queue, moderation and moderation log, result tables and exports. See the API reference.
• MCP: create_poll_event, add_poll_event_question, control_poll_event, get_poll_event, get_poll_event_results, list_poll_event_questions, moderate_poll_event_question, get_poll_event_moderation_log, export_poll_event, list_poll_events. See the MCP tools.

Control calls carry expected_state_version; a stale value answers 409 revision_conflict together with the latest state.

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Next

• Presentation mode →
• Polls overview →