A site whose feedback forum I was actively using a few months ago is really slow at responding to any ideas presented there. As a result, I and many others quickly ran out of votes as they are virtually never returned, yet we'd like to keep supporting the ideas we support. There may be new good ideas there but what's the point in reading them when you cannot vote or have to juggle with the available votes?

So, my suggestion is that the system should periodically increase the number of votes a user has at their disposal. This could be done so that if you are out of votes you get, say, one extra vote each month. If you still have votes left then you don't get new votes to give out.

I want to include "Vote" links in our e-mail newsletter so recipients can click the link and be brought to a page where they can immediately vote.

Currently I can include a link to the idea page, but they then have to click the Vote button on that page, and then select the number of votes before voting.

I'm not necessarily looking for the ability for the person to click a button in the newsletter and have a vote automatically register (eg: using single sign-on).

Instead, what I'd like is a way to specify that the voting dialog be open when you load an idea page. Either that or a specific voting page for an idea page.

For instance, it would be nice to be able to add "vote=true" to the end of the URL and have either a) the vote dialog open so the user can just click on the number of votes they want to assign or b) a special vote page which moved the vote dialog above the idea so it doesn't block the idea when it's opened.

(a.k.a. think about "allow negative votes" again)

suggestion: allow "for" and "against" votes (not talking about negative anymore...)

property: track two numbers instead of just one: count "for" and "against" votes individually, don't just keep one final number.

reason: currently there's no way to know if a "high traffic" suggestion has a large proportion of users who disagree with the suggestion, other than reading through thousands of comments.

possible options/configurations:
- the whole thing could be optional (based on admin decision)
- "against" votes could also count against the user's vote total.
- "total votes" (for+against) could be displayed in the overview (with some ratio/percentage indicator or red/green bar, either in the overview, only in the details view, or only for admins - this could also be configurable)
- to avoid "political" battles, the maximum "against" vote could be limited to -1 (could also be configurable)

advantages:
- much more feedback value without making the user experience significantly more complicated
- allows quick overview of user opinions before reading thousands of comments
- more numbers for admins to base decisions on: total votes (for + against), vote balance (for - against), vote ratio/percentage (for/against), individual number of for and against votes
- even higher vote numbers in forum if total votes (for+against) are displayed
- no ideas get lost when they get many "against" votes - total number of votes still increasing!

I work for a local government body that needs to be able to manually or through bulk upload change the number of votes for ideas.

We are collecting answers to our forum question offline at our events on paper. We've tried bulk uploading these offline ideas and merging them to existing ones, but if we don't select the "winning" idea a certain way the vote counts don't aggregate. If we merge the ideas with the other idea being the winner, the vote counts aggregate but the Admin gets credit for the idea from there on out.

I feel like I'm missing something...

When new user enters an idea, or votes for someone else's idea for first time, he just presented with option to choose from "1 votes", "2 votes", "3 votes". It can be confusing what this actually means. On my feedback forum most users give just 1 vote for their only idea. I suppose this is because they don't understand they could give it 3 votes to have better chances for their idea to be on top in overall list.
There is also no mention (until you register) that you have 10 votes that you can distribute among ideas you like. I afraid some users just don't understand the idea of how those votes work.
I like the simple interface design, but there are should be some hints, especially for new users.

I recently noticed the "reset voting" option is missing from the Admin Panel. Normally, from the Admin Panel, I could click "Feedback", then select a forum, click the "Ideas Tab", click the "Option Icon [the cog], and select "reset voting".

We use this feature as part of our workflow of gathering ideas, then holding a round for prioritization. The "reset" option keeps all of our data clean and accurate throughout the process. We have a handful of different groups that use this process for different purposes, but the basic set up is like this:

A forum is created with unlimited votes in the system. All users begin populating the forum with ideas. After a week or two of collecting ideas, the forum is closed. Ideas are cleaned up and merged as needed. Then, all votes that may exist in the forum are reset [so all ideas have a vote count of zero]. Then, the number of votes available to the users is changed from "unlimited" to "6", so they can rank their "High - 3 votes", "Medium - 2 votes" and "Low - 1 vote". After everyone has had a chance to vote, it's easy to identify the top ideas we need to focus on. With the ability to present a group with a list of ideas to vote on, voting rounds can be held in near "real-time" [before a meeting to set an agenda, for example].

As a workaround, I am aware I can export my forum to a csv file, after the "collection" round, then remove any votes manually from the csv file, before importing the ideas into a new forum [all ideas would then have zero votes]. The problem is that we would "lose" all of the comments associated with the original ideas, which could be useful during the voting round. This need to export/edit/import also adds a lot of manual work for the admin - with the "reset" option, I was able to perform the administrative functions from mobile devices in minutes.

I hope that UserVoice considers bringing the "Reset Voting" option back. It's possible users did not find much use for it, but I'm curious if many considered how useful UV can be in this scenario. I think for businesses, the flexibility of UserVoice is what makes it truly powerful - and certainly helps find its way into a wide range of uses.

Thanks for considering.