Hi @LuxWad , thanks for mentioning those.
The poll module on the sidebar won’t be coming back, and frankly I won’t miss it. It was by far the the most buggy and troublesome aspect of the old site, as explained here:
Anybody can add a poll now, either as the first post in a new thread, or even farther down in a comment/reply. Just click the gear icon in the post editor and then “Build poll”.
The Related Sites section would be a bit difficult to implement well in the new sidebar, but I’m considering adding a single link for Related Sites in the sidebar and make that go to a locked thread with the same list of links we had before.