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Summary | Discourse Topic Voting lets community members vote on topics in designated categories. |
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Install Guide | This plugin is bundled with Discourse core. There is no need to install the plugin separately. |
While Discourse Topic Voting can be used for a variety of use cases, this documentation is focused on the primary use case of an ideas or feature request category.
Setting up an ideas category
When creating a new category, select the ideas type to turn on Discourse Topic Voting for that category.
The Category name and Style fields will be present with sensible defaults, which you can overwrite if needed.
Note: When you are editing an existing category, the Category type field will let you add or remove category types. Category types can be combined so you can use features like voting and marketing answers as solutions (via Discourse Solved) together.
On the Ideas tab, you can adjust some of the default settings for this and any other ideas categories in your community.
- Show who voted: Allow users to see who voted for a topic.
- Show votes on profile: Allow users to see their own votes in their activity feed. This is most important when votes are limited.
- Limit member votes: When enabled, members can only cast a certain number of votes based on their trust level.
Voting for a topic
Members can vote for topics in ideas categories by interacting with the counter in the topic header.
Inside an ideas category, members can click the Votes top menu item to sort ideas by their vote count. The My Votes top menu item filters to only show topics they’ve voted for. In addition to the counter inside a topic, you can also see votes on the topic card.
Here are the views a user will see before and after voting in a topic:
When show votes on profile is enabled, there is also a section in the user’s profile page that displays their active votes:
Note: In ideas categories, Likes are automatically deactivated. To use both likes and votes at the same time, see: Show both like and vote button on topics
Limiting votes
When Limit member votes is enabled, members only have a certain number of available votes. When a vote is cast, that is called an “active vote”. Vote limits are meant to encourage thoughtful voting on the topics that matter most.
- The vote limit is determined by trust level; see the above section for more details.
- Each user can cast only one vote per topic.
- Votes are locked when a topic is closed or archived, but the votes are no longer considered active. The members who cast these votes will have their one vote from that topic restored to their pool of available votes.
- 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, causing them to exceed their Active Vote limit, they simply need to wait until topics are closed or archived to allow them to vote again.
- If an entire topic (Topic A) is merged into another Topic-Voting topic (Topic B), all the the following takes place:
- Unique votes from Topic A are added to Topic B.
- Duplicated votes (the same user voted in both topics) from Topic A will not be added to Topic B. Instead, the vote from Topic A will be restored to the user’s pool of available votes.
- Topic A’s vote count is set to zero and the topic is closed so that no further voting can take place in Topic A.
Settings
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
topic voting enabled |
Allow users to vote on topics? |
topic voting enable vote limits |
Limit the number of votes per user based on trust level. When disabled, members can vote on as many topics as they want. |
topic voting show who voted |
Allow users to see who voted? |
topic voting show votes on profile |
Allow users to see their votes in their activity feed? |
topic voting alert votes left |
Alert user when this many votes are left |
topic voting tl0 vote limit |
How many active votes are TL0 users allowed? |
topic voting tl1 vote limit |
How many active votes are TL1 users allowed? |
topic voting tl2 vote limit |
How many active votes are TL2 users allowed? |
topic voting tl3 vote limit |
How many active votes are TL3 users allowed? |
topic voting tl4 vote limit |
How many active votes are TL4 users allowed? |
Note: The
topic voting alert votes leftand varioustopic voting TLN vote limitsettings only apply whentopic voting enable vote limitsis enabled.
Topic Voting badges
These badges are disabled by default. You can enable them in the Badges area in the admin settings.
| Name | Description | Long Description | Type | Grouping |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daydreamer | Receive a vote on your topic | This badge is granted for receiving a vote on one of your topics.  Nice idea. 
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Community |
| Brainstormer | Receive 5 votes on your topic | This badge is granted for receiving 5 votes on one of your topics. Your topic is getting traction. |
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Community |
| Innovator | Receive 15 votes on your topic | This badge is granted for receiving 15 votes on one of your topics. So good it can’t be ignored. |
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Community |
| Visionary | Receive 25 votes on your topic | This badge is granted for receiving 25 votes on one of your topics. Give the people what they want! 
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Community |
Data Explorer queries
List people who voted for a topic along with their email addresses:
--[params]
-- int :topic_id
SELECT
tvv.user_id,
email
FROM topic_voting_votes tvv
JOIN user_emails ue ON ue.user_id = tvv.user_id
WHERE topic_id = :topic_id
AND ue.primary = true
More explorer queries can be found in Community Building > Data & reporting - Topics tagged topic-voting
Last edited by @lindsey 2026-06-17T18:17:18Z
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