When reading a topic in an ideas category, members can now interact with the voting button at any time in the topic header. Previously, members could only find the vote button at the top of the page. Now it’s accessible in the topic header, so members can cast their vote from anywhere within the topic.
Notification prompts after voting
After a member votes for an idea, Discourse will ask members if they want to get notified about new posts in this topic. When selected, this will update the notification level for the topic to Watching so they can stay on top of new activity in this topic. This change makes it easy for members to opt-in to updates about ideas they care about.
When within an ideas category, the Hot sorting option now accounts for voting recency. While the Votes sorting lets members see topics by the overall number of votes, Hot can now help you and your members find ideas that are gaining recent traction in your community.
Hi @lindsey, is it also planned to change the ‘Top’ sorting, so that it accounts for topic votes? And: Is this change also related to the global ‘Hot’ /hot, or does it only work inside a category /c/ ? Many thanks!
We don’t have plans for that at the moment! Happy to hear more about your interest in this, though, so we can consider it going forward.
The change to Hot only impacts the ideas category itself. It would be difficult to figure out how to factor that in to the global list, where not all topics are eligible to receive votes.
Discobot told me this about the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘top’:
The main difference is that Hot balances overall popularity with recent activity, while Top only looks at total popularity over a specific time period (like the week or month).
Hot: Combines total likes/reactions with recent likes and active replies. It is designed to surface currently trending discussions, making it ideal for large, active communities.
Top: Ranks topics solely by their total likes/reactions within the selected timeframe. It is best for catching up on what was popular while you were away.
Both rely on likes, but Hot also factors in recent posters and replies to determine “hotness.” You can read more about this in the Hot topic sorting announcement.
To me that sounds very similar and that’s why I think it should also be included in ‘top’. I’m not yet very experienced with discourse though, so I might totally be wrong here of course.
Edit: Oh, I might have misread, I’m sorry! This is about vote recency. I did not realize “top” already reacts to up/down votes!
Maybe it could be used in a similar way to the likes but additionally decrease the time the topic is visible if it gets negative votes.
In ideas categories (like Contribute > Feature), there is the Votes filter which orders by votes only, so that helps a bit too.
So between Votes and Hot sorting, you can see the straight most voted topics and then the topics with most recent / trending activity (including votes).
In ideas categories (like Contribute > Feature), there is the Votes filter which orders by votes only, so that helps a bit too.
That might also be a nice addition for the frontpage: a /vote feed that shows topics from all ‘ideas’ categories.
So between Votes and Hot sorting, you can see the straight most voted topics and then the topics with most recent / trending activity (including votes).
Voting button is accessible while scrolling
Notification prompts after voting
Hot sorting accounts for vote recency