I wasn’t sure if I had voted in a Helicopter wishlist and so I clicked on the Vote icon up at the top of the thread (blithely ignoring the VOTED box and the Remove Vote option that popped up after the click). The main thing that I noticed is a little message box flashed up that said something like “You have 9,981 votes left.” That seemed like a rather generous supply. I thought I’d go to my Profile Activity Summary and see what I had previously voted for. And I found that when looking at my Activity pag, there is a list of threads on which I have voted under Votes in a navigation list to the left in the Activity view.
Don’t know if it’s essential or whether I’ll have ever exhausted my allowed votes and be deciding what I want to remove a vote from, but it would be nice if threads with Votes were tagged by moderators as to their eventual fate as is typical in UserVoice forums, e.g., “Added,” “Working On It,” “Planned,”, “Under Review,” “Declined,” etc. Then, perhaps for a feature “Added” or “Working On It,” we could recover our votes and it would be convenient if it could be done all at once for a given type of tag such as “Added” or “Resolved” rather than someday having to visit 300 individual resolved threads to reclaim votes.
Since I’ve only used 19 of my apparently initial 10K potential thread votes, I am apparently making much ado about nothing! But with a forum as massive as this one is becoming in a little under a month, anything that condenses management down to a nutshell will be helpful in the long term.
As far as I know, the Discourse Plugin requires that users are allocated a specific number of votes. The Community Team have set that limit to 10,000, so while it is possible one might run out one day, I doubt it.
Your votes are automatically reclaimed if a topic is locked, merged (and locked) or moved out of a category that does not support votes.
The plan at this stage is that we will start moving threads from Bugs & Issues and presumably Wishlist into #self-service:resolved-bugs when they are no longer relevant. This category is archived meaning you cannot post, like or vote, but more importantly, your votes should be restored when the threads are moved into that topic.
I hope this information helps somewhat, sorry it took me a few days to respond. I realise I haven’t addressed your suggestion (quoted above) fully, it is not my place to do so. I have tagged your topic with forum-feedback so we can easily come back to this topic if and/when our plans for the voting system change.
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback.
I guess I could joke with all the multiple threads on topics, e.g., “helicopters are a must!,” I can use all the votes I can get my hands on to vote multiple times in related threads! - but even then, it would be ■■■■ hard to exhaust 10,000 votes!
On the topic of votes, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to limit the number of votes per user to, for instance, 5? This way, they only vote for features or bugs which matter most to them rather than have multiple topics with 1000 votes each.
It’s also much easier this way to gauge the community’s needs and wants better.
What a weird request. Why would you want to limit people on what they can vote for? There are a lot of different subjects people want to see added/changed and they would be limited to select a top 5. This means subjects with little votes are most likely never reach the top because your vote is useless.
Because if we can vote for anything and everything, what’s the point of voting?
The primary function of being able to vote is to choose our preferences. If a forum has 10,000 members, and if all 10,000 members voted on all the feature request topics, how do you find out what the community’s top preferences are?
Instead, if everyone has a limited number of votes, they’ll only vote for the topics they strongly support, and in the end you have a much clearer idea of the community’s interests in terms of being able to sort by vote count.
Once those features are implemented, the topics are closed, upon which the votes are automatically returned, and people can vote for different topics later.
