I’m not so sure. There’s a lot of engineering and thought that’s gone into keeping the “reply” button available at all times as you scroll through the thread – this way, people can engage easily. But it’s a lot harder to spend your votes. There are, I think, a few ways that people interact with voting:
- They open a suggestion, read the first message in the thread, and vote. This is handled really elegantly at present.
- They open a suggestion, read through the entire thread (or part of it), and vote. This is more problematic – they have to then scroll back up to the top.
- They return to an old topic when they get some votes “back”, and want to vote on it. Again, it’s necessary to scroll back up to the top.
Yes, I would agree that in the majority of cases, the voting as it is works well. But I do think it’s worth considering how we can keep engagement up at all times.
Is it worth considering (as in the original suggestion) duplicating the voting widget at the bottom of the thread, rather than trying to engineer an “always available” model?
More pragmatically, I’ve had a go at making the voting widget sticky through CSS, but I’ve been struggling to get it to work because of its placement in the DOM. Maybe we could change where it’s output so that it’s easier to experiment with this behaviour, and implement it via customisation?