We’ve made it easier to create ideas / feature request type categories on Discourse! This update leverages our existing Discourse Topic Voting plugin, but simplifies the setup process and makes it easy to manage related settings during category creation.
Note: On our hosting, Discourse Topic Voting is available on the Business or higher tiers.
In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this today.
What’s changed
When creating a new category, you’ll now see three types:
When you select the Ideas category type, we’ll set up everything you need for this category type — most importantly, enabling the Allow users to vote on topics in this category which lets members vote on topics that they like (see our Feature category here on Meta for an example of how this looks).
- On the General tab, the Category name and Style fields are automatically configured
- On the Ideas tab, the most useful settings for this type of category are available for you to adjust as needed. We’ve also added a new Limit member votes setting, which makes it easy to completely disable vote limits if you do not want this limitation in your community.
All these settings can be customized to meet your exact specifications. These defaults are based on how we use this type of category in our own community and how we’ve seen it be most successful in other Discourse communities.
Turning on ideas type category setup in your community
For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.
To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable idea category type setup item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
What do you think?
Over to you: we’d love to hear what you think of this new feature. What do you like and dislike; what is working well, and what could be improved?
). Perhaps an additional checkbox that becomes unavailable if you have limited votes active.