Discourse Post Voting

[Discourse]

	Summary	Discourse Post Voting allows the creation of topics with votable posts.
	Install Guide	This plugin is bundled with Discourse core. There is no need to install the plugin separately.

As this is an official plugin maintained by the Discourse team, Support, Bug, UX, and Feature requests can be made in the respective categories here on Meta, and tagged with the appropriate plugin tag. Click on a link below to get one started.

 Support  Bug  UX  Feature

Features

To create a new topic with votable posts open the menu in the top left of the composer and select ‘Toggle Post Voting’:

With the topic in Post Voting mode, there’s a filter to sort answers by votes or by activity. Here’s an example of one in action:

Configuration

Site Settings

Once installed, the plugin is enabled by default and the available admin settings are:

Setting	Site Description
post voting enabled	Enable Post Voting Plugin
post voting undo vote action window	Number of minutes users are allowed to undo votes in Post Voting topics (enter 0 for no limit)
post voting comment limit per post	Number of comments allowed on each post
post voting enable likes on answers	Enable like button on replies on Post Voting topics
min trust to flag posts voting comments	Minimum trust level to flag a post voting comment

Category-specific Settings

There are two category settings available. Use the wrench on the category page and access settings to see these:

Hosted by us? This plugin is available on our Business and Enterprise plans Post Voting | Discourse - Civilized Discussion

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Credits

This plugin is inspired by Pavilion’s fantastic work on the Question Answer Plugin. As always, thank you for your continued contributions to the Discourse project.

[Catija]

I am a bit of a Q&A fanatic, so I’m excited to see this new post format available in Discourse and tickled by how… familiar… it seems! I have some questions about the functionality and how customizable it is. Much of this may be answered in the plugin package but I figure it might be helpful to have here, too…

1. Is there education built in for the plugin that teaches users about the feature, how/when to use it, etc? I love @discobot - maybe there’s a tutorial/onboarding module for Q&A?
2. You say admins can set the default within a category to Q&A - if they do, are topics required to be Q&A or do they just default to it?
   • If it’s a default, is there an option to require it? Can Q&A be disabled by category, too?
3. If a category is set to default to Q&A, is this something that’s apparent to users? I see that the post creation button will say it’s a Q&A but I can imagine a seasoned user’s first interaction with the newly-added feature might lead them to overlook the text without something drawing attention to the post type before it’s submitted.

Thanks for making this cool feature official!

[nat (Natalie T)]

@Catija

You say admins can set the default within a category to Q&A - if they do, are topics required to be Q&A or do they just default to it?

• If it’s a default, is there an option to require it? Can Q&A be disabled by category, too?

Yes, OP needs an update, these are the current options in category settings

@Catija

• If a category is set to default to Q&A, is this something that’s apparent to users?

The user will see a different button in the composer. You can change the button text via text customization.

[jrgong]

Has anyone been able to limit the amount of votes per user per topic? In our case, we are running photocontests, and we would like to limit each user to 5 votes max per topic.

[dreieck]

Ahoj,

in  this post I was directed to post the issue here to give the feedback.

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In the thread linked above in the OpenStreetMap forum, where this plugin is used in some categories, user interface shortcomings with this plugin are discussed.

In short there are:

This plugin forbids to post a reply to a reply. It is debateable if this should be enforced or to be configurable on a per-instance basis, but it it is enabled, the following occurs:

• The user can select some text and quote. The user can enter a reply. Only at the very end, when the reply is to be sent, it is aborted with an error message

  An error occurred: You are not allowed to create a post in reply to another post.

  This is a not really helpful message. It does not tell what is wrong. In fact, if a reply is not allowed, it should not have allowed “quote-reply” in the first place at all.

• When a reply is sent via email, the email just vanishes without the sender beeing informed. There should be a bounce with an explanatory message saying what is wrong.

• Only comments are allowed. But they swallow some formatting (e.g. quotes, see the comment on  this post), and also they are limited in numbers of characters, prohibiting more complex thoughts.

Regards!

[Ahmed26]

@Discourse

comments on replies are hidden after 5 comments

How can I remove the 5 comment limit and make it appear only with the option to show comments?

[Gotchur]

@dreieck

Ahoj,

in  this post I was directed to post the issue here to give the feedback.

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In the thread linked above in the OpenStreetMap forum, where this plugin is used in some categories, user interface shortcomings with this plugin are discussed.

In short there are:

This plugin forbids to post a reply to a reply. It is debateable if this should be enforced or to be configurable on a per-instance basis, but it it is enabled, the following occurs:

• The user can select some text and quote. The user can enter a reply. Only at the very end, when the reply is to be sent, it is aborted with an error message

  An error occurred: You are not allowed to create a post in reply to another post.

  This is a not really helpful message. It does not tell what is wrong. In fact, if a reply is not allowed, it should not have allowed “quote-reply” in the first place at all.

• When a reply is sent via email, the email just vanishes without the sender beeing informed. There should be a bounce with an explanatory message saying what is wrong.

• Only comments are allowed. But they swallow some formatting (e.g. quotes, see the comment on  this post), and also they are limited in numbers of characters, prohibiting more complex thoughts.

Regards!

Went searching for this same thing and was surprised it hadn’t been brought up before. Allowing the user to always end up in an error state with quotes and no option for markup in comments offers a very disjointed experience. Additionally, the error messaging is unclear for users when trying to directly reply to a post.

Definitely hoping to see an improvement to help polish this UX.

[Ahmed26]

After 5 comments, other comments are hidden
how do I make it so that after 1 or 2 comments other comments are hidden

[Shauny (Shaun Robinson)]

A couple of questions about this great plugin:

1. Why does the first post (the OP) get voting options? Surely that’s the question, so should not be voted on like it’s an answer?
2. Any hints on some Badge SQL I can use to make badges out of these? Get 10 votes in a vote post topic, etc…?

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

I found one for topic voting that can maybe be modified for post voting?

Badge ideas for Topic Voting

Great plugin. Because everyone loves badges, I’ve put together some basic queries for badges based on voting. (As I’m still finding my way around the DB and the way badges work in Discourse, there may be issues with these queries – but I think they’re right!) Suggester: Granted to users who have made a suggestion (fa-lightbulb-o) Trigger when a user creates a post select users.id user_id, p.created_at granted_at from users join badge_posts p on users.id = p.user_id join topics t on…

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

Is it possible to limit the number of downvotes that users can cast globally across all topics within a day, with this plugin?

[king_laurel (Laurel)]

Is it possible to move the location of this feature? Ideally we’d like to have it where the current double button like button is.

[SoteFun]

I can’t @ a user when replying to a post in a voting post. Is this intentional or a bug?

[JammyDodger]

Within the comment rather than in a ‘proper’ reply? If so, I think that is intentional to keep the comments more lightweight than a full composer experience. This has been asked before (How to mention in Discourse comments, or disable commenting?), but I don’t think a Feature request was submitted in the end.

[JammyDodger]

@Shauny

Why does the first post (the OP) get voting options? Surely that’s the question, so should not be voted on like it’s an answer?

I think this also. But Sam is adamant that it is a thing:

@sam

This is very much a site pref. Voting on quality of questions is something pretty established on Stack Overflow like sites.

We kept the voting control deliberately, removing it via CSS is fine though, open to maybe adding a site setting for it as well.

@Shauny

Any hints on some Badge SQL I can use to make badges out of these? Get 10 votes in a vote post topic, etc…?

It doesn’t look like there are any badges knocking around for this yet.

If you have specific badge criteria for any you’d like to create you should fire up a Data & reporting topic for each one.

I think a couple of examples could be along the lines of:

get 10 votes on a post voting reply

SELECT p.user_id, p.created_at AS granted_at, p.id AS post_id
FROM post_voting_votes pvv
  JOIN posts p ON p.id = pvv.votable_id
WHERE pvv.direction = 'up'
  AND p.post_number <> 1
  AND (:backfill OR p.id IN (:post_ids))
GROUP BY p.user_id, p.id
HAVING COUNT(*) >=10

Or a slightly more nuanced one where you accounted for ‘up - down’ votes:

WITH vote_totals AS (

SELECT 
    p.user_id,
    p.id AS post_id,
    p.created_at AS granted_at,
    (COUNT(*) FILTER (WHERE pvv.direction = 'up') - COUNT(*) FILTER (WHERE pvv.direction = 'down')) AS total
FROM post_voting_votes pvv
  JOIN posts p ON p.id = pvv.votable_id
WHERE p.post_number <> 1
GROUP BY 1, 2

)

SELECT *
FROM vote_totals 
WHERE total >= 10
  AND (:backfill OR post_id IN (:post_ids))

These will need some further testing to make sure they’re working as intended.

Though one thing to consider is that the total is dynamic so a ‘10’ today could turn into a ‘5’ tomorrow if more downvotes are added (for the second example). And if the badge is just based on upvotes like the first example then you may have got 10, but the UI only shows 5 when the downvotes are totalled in.

[patrickemin]

Hi, just activated that plugin on a French site and noticed the wrong French translation for the second option in the category settings:

Les nouveaux sujets ne peuvent être que des sujets postérieurs au vote dans cette catégorie.

It should be:

Les nouveaux sujets ne peuvent être que des sujets de vote de message dans cette catégorie.

explanation: confusion between “post” as a message that can be a post and post as “posterior”, meaning after.

[patrickemin]

Hi, also is it possible to activate posts voting for topics that have already been published ? Thanks

[tobiaseigen]

This plugin is now bundled with Discourse core as part of Bundling more popular plugins with Discourse core. If you are self-hosting and use the plugin, you need to remove it from your app.yml before your next upgrade.