Category based vote limits

feature
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Is there a way to do category-based vote limits? I would like to have feature requests category with only few votes, but then also a bug tracking category with limitless votes so that a vote would mean “i experienced this”.

Or would like/hearts be the better way for latter? It just feels wrong to like a bug…

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I think this is a very good feature request, not immediately planned.

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I’m testing out the voting plugin right now and I think this feature would be a good fit for our use case. Would be grateful for advice and ideas. Thanks! :seedling:

We are considering using this plugin to allow the community to vote for representatives to join our network guidance committee. There might be more than one opening at a time with up to 6 candidates vying for the same opening. My thinking is that we’d have a VOTING category with voting plugin enabled sub-categories for each opening. Within each opening category there would be one topic per candidate, authored by the candidate, containing their message introducing themselves and why they should be elected. All site members would be allowed just one vote for each candidate.

So the current model that gives each user a set number of votes they can “spend” however they like doesn’t work. We’d have to provide enough votes for each user to be able to vote for all candidates, but do not want to have them spend them all on the same candidate.

For those who might be curious, here's the full election process as we are considering it right now.
  • NGC members serve for 3 year, renewable terms. A vacancy arises when an NGC member decides not to renew their NGC membership for another term. Filling the vacancy will be based on universal criteria applying to all NGC members as well as specific criteria to round out the committee (e.g. gender of candidate or by region, theme, type of organization represented).
  • On April 1st of each year, announce vacancies for nominations.
  • This call for nominations will be open for two months until June 1st.
  • Candidates, whether by nomination or self-nomination, must submit a resume and cover letter stating their intent to be on the NGC.
  • All who submit appropriate documentation are called “nominees”.
  • A selection committee made up of network team members and NGC members reviews the resumes and documentation of nominees. The selection committee will decide which nominees clearly do not meet minimal qualifications and eliminate those nominees. This requires a unanimous agreement by all members of the selection committee.
  • Those nominees who meet the minimal qualifications will be contacted by a member of the selection committee for screening.
  • By August 1st, the selection committee will select no more than 6 people for each vacancy to be considered for election. These selected individuals will be called “candidates”. The selection process will be done by consensus. If consensus cannot be achieved, then the chair of the selection committee may call for a simple majority vote on any nominee becoming a candidate with the chair of the committee having the deciding vote.
  • Two months later, on October 1st, the results of the election are announced and the retired NGC members are removed and the new NGC members are added to the NGC page and discourse group.

A simpler alternative may be to create poll topics for each opening, and add the “pitch” text and maybe a photo for each candidate to the OP. But it seemed interesting to create some healthy and fun competition by having multiple topics that people can vote on.

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I just made a PR that implements category based vote limits. Category based limits can be set for each trust level for each category. Category limits override ‘site’ limits.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-voting/pull/27

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Yes, why not simply add a poll to the Topic? You could link to the candidates details.

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@angus nice work. This Wil be handy and I look forward to trying it out.

Yep. We are leaning in this direction. Much simpler.

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@tobiaseigen Actually, you may be interested in the elections plugin I just completed. It fits your use case quite well. It extends the concept of having one poll per topic. I built it for my own purposes (i.e. I’m going to be actively using it), so I’m keen on ironing out any issues it may have / getting the feature set right.

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hey everyone! I’m not sure if this is the right thread (but I’ve been perusing around and it seems like it could be) but we are looking to allow for more than one upvote for a topic. Is this something that a plugin (that already exists or is under development) could support?

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We experimented with super votes in the past, but it got fiendishly complex to explain to end users. We don’t have any current plans to add super voting or extra voting cause I think the complexity this adds is just too high.

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I’d like to request the ability to set the number of allowed votes on a per-category basis. The main use case for me is allowing separate voting on features vs. bugs, as I see the prioritization of both as important but independent of each other. I don’t necessarily want to give people e.g. 20 votes they can use entirely in Features, but I feel 10 is too few for the combination of Features and Bugs. I’m curious if anyone else sees it this way and, if not, how you handle prioritization of bugs vs. features in relation to this plugin.

I realize this is probably a fairly major feature request for this plugin, but I think could be quite helpful (and I’m surprised it hasn’t been requested before, although with auto-delete of replies here, maybe that’s why I don’t see it…). Hopefully it can be considered.

Edit: now that my thread has been merged here (sorry for the dupe, I did search but wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for…). I’m just curious what happened to the discussion here. Seems like it got a little sidetracked, but the original feature request is still very useful IMO. I did already tag Angus in the other, so hopefully he’ll weigh-in…

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@oshyan Yup, it’s doable, however I’d want to redo that PR entirely as the plugin has changed alot in the past 4 years (geez has it been that long?).

Realistically, I don’t have the time to do this in the next couple of months, but as it’s a relatively contained piece of work and a feasible PR candidate, it could get done in the following ways:

  1. a member of Pavilion as part of their open source work for Pavilion (perhaps @fzngagan, @keegan or @kcereru might be interested);

  2. someone else who’s interested in doing some open source discourse work (if you are, ping me if you need help; @Ahmed_Gagan?);

  3. if there is budget for this, you can make a #marketplace post, Pavilion can take it on as a paid gig (i.e. it’ll get done sooner / the developer will be incentivised); or

  4. if the discourse team does it.

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Thank you for the thorough reply! I don’t currently have budget for this, but I will see if I can pull any together.

If anyone else here were also interested, we might be able to pull together enough collectively. I would contribute some personal funds toward that, but could only manage a couple hundred USD. Jump in here if you could do the same!

More generally, I am curious if anyone else sees this as being as valuable as I do, and sees the same dichotomy between votes on Features vs. Bugs. Do any of the officially hosted forums make heavy use of Voting? (I don’t expect them to be identified by name, more just exploring the question of how valuable it might be to Discourse paying customers)

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Yes, I do. Preferably a global limit for all categories unless a specific category has a lower vote limit set.

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Yes! We recently used topic voting for awarding poster prizes at a workshop:

This is a great use case for this functionality: the voting can be quarantined to just one sub-category, and we can do the same thing at our next workshop without having to wipe out votes in the previous competition.

It would also allow for topic voting on more than one stream at a time.

1 Like