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Free text: the question you answer by writing
Questionnaires now take free-text questions: what people write is read only by the organiser, grouped by keywords; the public sees only the number.
· Cibernatural · 3 min read · Updated on 2026-10-11
Some things do not fit in an option. "What would you change about the service?" is not answered by ticking a box: it is answered by writing. From today a GloboPoll questionnaire can include free-text questions, next to single choice, multiple choice, yes / no, rating, ranking, points and matrices.
What voters see
A text area, with a counter of the characters left and a notice that matters: what they write will only be seen by whoever runs the poll. It is not published on the poll page, it does not appear in the widget and it does not travel through the public API. A text question can be required or optional, like any other, and an optional one can be left blank.
Whoever creates the poll sets the maximum length of the answer (20 to 2000 characters). There are no other settings: a text question has no options and no count.
What organisers see
The answers, newest first, in the Results tab of the dashboard. And above them, the part that actually saves time: the keywords. GloboPoll splits each answer into words, drops the ones that carry no meaning ("the", "of", "that", "very"…) and counts how many answers mention each word, not how many times it appears. If thirty people mention "price" and eight mention "hours", you see it at a glance; clicking a word shows only the answers that mention it.
It is a simple grouping on purpose. It does not try to guess what each sentence means, so it cannot be wrong in an invisible way: it tells you what people wrote and how often. When questionnaires reach thousands of answers we will look at grouping by meaning; for now, keywords solve what a council, an association or a company needs in order to read two hundred answers without reading them one by one.
An answer that should not be there (an insult, someone else's personal data) can be hidden: it leaves the list, the keywords and the export, and the vote still counts.
On the public page and in the exports
On the poll page, a text question shows how many people answered it and nothing else. It is the same rule the "Other" option already followed: what people write is their data, and GloboPoll does not turn it into public content.
In the dashboard, "Export votes" carries each answer on its row (hidden ones, blank) and "Export results" adds one row per keyword with the number of answers that mention it. The REST API and the closing notification (poll.closed) carry the maximum length and the number of answers, never the texts.
What is left of the advanced questionnaire
With free text and the matrix, the only piece left of the advanced questionnaire is conditional logic: showing a question depending on the answer to another. It is the next item on the list.
If you already have a questionnaire, open the editor, add a question and choose "Free text". The questionnaire is still part of the Pro plan; text questions cost nothing extra.
If you are not sure which poll type fits, Nine poll types: which one to use, and when covers each one with an example, how it is counted and which plan includes it.