Vote button

[Gryphonknight]

@NitrousOxide

Does it apply to only the first post, or will my vote change based on how the thread evolves after I vote? What if I like the suggestions that have evolved but not the original post?

When activated, the vote plugin appears to separate “Votes” for a “Idea & Feature Request” thread from “likes” for individual authors.

Example
Someone on a cat forum creates the topic “Cats are awesome ( 20 characters )”. But then the third reply is “Dogs are better ( 20 characters )” and both the original topic and the reply get 5k likes each, it can be confusing since the software will show 10k likes.

With the plug in, if the topic then got 2k votes, the forum admin can see the idea of the topic has 2k member votes.

The dog person could create their own topic “Dogs are better ( 20 characters )” and it might only get 1k votes.

Likes are plentiful, they reward people being good forum members.

Votes are rare, and indicate things you are passionate about.

Votes would reflect you like the topic thread. Liking a reply would mean you like the individual author’s reply.

Some notes about the mechanic

• If the topic is closed or archived, the votes are released to the users and can be applied to other topics but the vote count on the topic remains.
• If a topic is re-opened or unarchived, the votes are reclaimed and applied back to the users active vote count.
• If a topic reclaims the votes of a user and they go over their limit, they simply need to wait until topics are closed or archived to allow them to vote again.

Removing your vote to spend elsewhere

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your request, but you can easily remove you vote from a topic. Simply click on Voted, then X Remove vote

This is the “Idea & Feature request” that created the Vote button for discourse, but the implementation is different.

"Post likes” and “Feature likes” don’t overlap well. If a company makes a popular Android app, the first person to type up a 70-character long “Make an iOS port” topic could quickly garner 1000 Likes. In this case the number of likes does not accurately reflect the quality of the post nor the user’s community participation. The flip side of this is that users might reserve their likes.

The motivation behind this plugin is to separate “votes on a feature” from “liking a post”.