Votech

Votech is the polling and voting platform in Tools. The new Votech runtime is separate from the historical BBVote archive.

Application surfaces

• /votech is the public Votech entry point for discovery and participation.
• /me/votech is the signed-in owner workspace for personal polls and Votech configuration.
• /admin/votech is the protected Votech platform area for global administration and moderation. Global Tools administrators have access, and selected Votech responsibilities can be delegated with granular Votech permissions.
• /api/votech is the canonical Votech API root.

Votech API URLs are not versioned. Clients should use /api/votech/...; URL prefixes such as /api/votech/v1 or /api/votech/v2 are not part of the contract.

Owner workspace

Signed-in users can now manage their Votech content from /me/votech. The owner workspace includes polls, projects, communities, categories and reusable or poll-local candidate objects.

Poll editing supports:

• draft creation and normal editing;
• single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, rating, ranking, head-to-head, bracket-ready, quiz, prediction, media-choice and open-text structures;
• multiple questions and ordered options;
• reusable candidate objects and poll-local candidates;
• public, unlisted and private visibility;
• live, after-vote, after-close, owner-only and hidden result policies;
• scheduled opening and closing times;
• owner or global security-profile selection;
• categories, structured settings and metadata;
• participation requirements such as account, verification, provider, group or invite rules;
• owner preview without submitting a vote;
• publish, unpublish and duplicate operations;
• reusable template marking and source tracking for duplicated polls.

Questions, options and poll-local candidates can be reordered from the editor. Poll duplication creates a new draft and copies the editor-owned structure, including questions, options, access rules and poll-local candidates. Vote history is never duplicated.

The editor saves mutating changes asynchronously instead of depending on normal form-post-and-redirect flows. Backend ownership checks remain authoritative regardless of which controls are visible in the page. A user cannot read or mutate another user's Votech editor resources by guessing their numeric IDs.

Draft polls can be deleted while they have no durable runtime history. Once runtime history such as votes, comments or abuse/security records depends on a poll, the owner must unpublish it instead of deleting that history.

Identity and participation requirements

Votech resolves participation identity on the server. A poll can require one or more supported identity properties without trusting identity claims supplied by browser code.

Supported participation requirements include:

• anonymous participation;
• a signed-in Tools account;
• a verified account or verified email address;
• a linked vBulletin account;
• membership in configured vBulletin user groups;
• a Google-linked or Facebook-linked Tools identity;
• a valid poll invitation/token;
• registered future identity providers through the same provider contract.

A linked Google, Facebook or vBulletin identity is used as an account property. Votech does not expose upstream OAuth access tokens, refresh tokens, passwords or provider credentials to Votech clients, and Votech does not copy those credentials into its voter identity records. Stored Votech identity references use stable privacy-conscious fingerprints instead of exposing raw provider subject identifiers.

Poll access decisions are enforced by the backend. Hiding or changing a control in the GUI does not grant participation or administration rights.

Owner and administration access

The owner workspace requires a Tools account. Poll ownership is checked independently for owner operations. Votech administration supports granular management permissions for polls, votes, security, moderation, legacy handling and platform settings in addition to the global Votech management permission. Global Tools administrators continue to pass these checks.

External/client API endpoints enforce their own authentication, ownership and scope requirements as functionality is added. Web permissions and API token scopes are separate controls.

BBVote archive

Historical BBVote material remains available separately through the BBVote archive. The archive is read-only and is not the storage or runtime used by new Votech polls.