Forum ideas voting

In the past it was possible for users to vote for up to about 5 ideas.

I found that no particularly informative because the topics I read in detail but thought would not enhance Manager were treated identically to topics I hadn’t read at all or topics I preferred to an earlier one but could not change my vote until the old topic was implemented.

It would be preferable in my opinion for users to rate ideas as

  • +2 support an idea and regularly require the functionality
  • +1 support an idea but rarely require the functionality
  • -1 do not support an idea and rarely require the functionality
  • -2 do not support the idea but frequently require the functionality
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But we lost voting altogether for a while now. But I hope it’s back since:

  • It gives users a sense of importance which will encourage contribution

  • It screens out good ideas from niche ones by means of natural selection (down voting would help here if an idea is going to affect some users negatively)

  • It will encourage focus on a single thread since there’s a motive to back an existing idea rather than go on a tangent somewhere else.

  • It reduces unnecessary arguments since a user isn’t going to go ranting if the idea is either heavily backed or heavily disliked by the community.

I’d also remove the 5 vote limit to better mimic natural selection of ideas especially for those that need to be screened out.

In my opinion down voting would never help. Users are simply going to down vote an idea when they find it inapplicable to their business or when they do not fully understand the idea. Lets just take a moment to review our experience on the forum where we constantly find users who are unaware or ignorant of the forum rules.

It might help to introduce a mandatory explanation before a user’s down vote is accepted. But that is just going to give a headache to forum moderators and waste the limited resources available for Manager development.

Yes @sharpdrivetek, you’re correct.

Maybe if a certain trust level is required before a user can down vote, maybe that could help.

Or maybe disable down votes of those who didn’t read the thread throughout and didn’t reply to it.

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The intention is for users to clearly and simply express a summary of their opinion.
Justify each vote would negate the value of voting as users can express their views in words in either case.
Imo there is no more need to justify a negative vote than to justifying a positive vote.

How the data should be used is completely separate. If I was using it I would look at a bar graph showing each category as a summary of forum users views. I would then do what I thought was best for the software business anyhow.

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This forum is for Discussion about manager only.
But this topic is related to voting feature of discourse forum itself.
So it will be better to discuss on discourse official Support Forum.
I would like to request @Tut & @Abeiku to close this topic to stop further Disscussions.

No, @Omnipotent.inc, the topic will not be closed. While the voting procedure that was in place was a feature of the Discourse platform that forum runs on, it was specifically selected by the developer as a feature he wanted to try. He never announced its removal and, therefore, did not explain why he decided to remove it. I presume he either learned what he wanted to while it was in place or decided to end it for some other reason.

But if forum members believe it was useful and would help support the application’s development, they are welcome to discuss it. Granted, forum voting is a not a direct feature of the program itself, but both the Guides and the forum are integral parts of the developer’s vision of user support.