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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
Once enabled, a “Votes” item is available in the top menu. The topics in that category can be voted on with the count of votes added next to the topic title.
Voting is also included next to the title when scrolled.
To make it easier to see vote counts from a topic list, the vote count is also added under the topic titles.
Here are the views a user will see before and after voting in a topic:
There is also a section in the user’s profile page that displays their active votes:
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 alert votes left | Alert user when this many votes are left |
| topic voting enabled | Allow users to vote on topics? |
| 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 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? |
EXTRAS
In the categories where the Voting plugin is activated, Likes are automatically deactivated. Some sites may want to use both functions at the same time to like replies, see how to re-enable Likes.
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 2026-06-16T21:00:49Z
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