Continuing the discussion from Feature to allow uservoice/getsatisfaction suggestions and voting:
“Post likes” and “Feature likes” don’t overlap well. If a company makes a popular Android app, the first person to type up a 70-character long “Make an iOS port” topic could quickly garner 1000 Likes. In this case the number of likes does not accurately reflect the quality of the post nor the user’s community participation. The flip side of this is that users might reserve their likes.
The motivation behind this plugin is to separate “votes on a feature” from “liking a post”.
Votes as an archetype of Likes
Votes could piggyback the Like design, but the two would be treated as completely separate entities, so that votes on features don’t count towards Trust Levels and such. So while the average post can have “Likes”, a special category could allow “Votes" as an additional metric, applied to the topic as a whole.
Topic view:
Topic view, scrolled down:
-
Votes are displayed above the topic creator’s post, distinguishing the title as a separate thing that you can vote on. You’re voting on the proposal, not the person.
-
Below, the forum works as normal. OP’s post can be Liked, just like everyone else’s.
-
Votes are per-topic only, not per-post as the way Likes work.
-
Votes should be revokable at any point in time
-
Votes would be anonymous to everyone except admins (configurable)
-
The plugin would be activated per-category, just like Solved.
-
Individual topics could still be unflagged as a feature request, to remove the votes counter and use it purely as a discussion (alternative workaround is to have a sub-category for feature discussions).
-
A user should only be allowed to have 10 active Votes (configurable)
-
Closing a topic would disallow further voting and return active votes (while retaining vote count).
As a result of such a plugin, the average like count on the first post in a feature request would almost certainly take a hit, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Stretch Goals
Show vote count in topic list
Similar to this:
“Planned” & “Done” buttons integrated with tags
The plugin would add “planned” and “done” buttons for moderators to click on, which would do a combination of actions like "close topic + apply ‘done’ tag + return active votes.
Votes by unregistered users
- The Votes button should be viewable and clickable by unregistered users (want to vote without registration? just attach your email to your vote and we’ll keep a staged account for you, no fuss)
Status notifications
When the status of a feature is changed to “Planned” or “Done”, an email notification will be sent out to all voters.
Super Votes
Users have 3 “Super Votes” as a way to differentiate between popular wishlist items and MUST-HAVEs. Both types of votes would count towards the same grand total of “Votes” (so technically the Super Vote is just an ordinary Vote with a special flag attached) but say;
If one feature has 50 Votes and 3 Super Votes, while another feature has 10 votes and 6 Super Votes, that’s interesting data.
Furthermore, only fully registered users (perhaps even limited to a TL or custom group like Customers, but this could be tweaked per community) get Super Votes, so it could work as an added incentive to participate as a real member of the community.
I was wondering why voting on the title would equate to voting on the proposal when OP’s post === Proposal in most cases. I personally don’t think the title is sufficient to represent a good proposal… it is usually a combination of the title and the use case described in OP’s post. 
