On the feature request page, we can express support through an up vote. However, it’s just as useful to be able to express that we don’t support a feature request. Is there a way to activate down votes?
Reason for this is that it’ll give us more accurate insights into how the engagement level and sentiments of the community. Currently, we can assume that a request with a few up votes means the community does not support it; however, we cannot confidently come to that conclusion because a request with a few up votes can also mean that the request has not had a lot of visibility and/or interaction. So, what we get with activating down votes is a way to accurately capture engagement and support for a request and/or proposal. As our user base grows, we’ll want to know how many of our users are engaging with proposals, how many approve, and how many disapprove. That’ll give the data to better inform decisions.
Thank you for reading and considering.
Edit: And maybe we can consider a requirement to submit a comment when doing a downvote so we can share why we don’t support. This could also be optional.
Edit 2: In addition, having an undecided option could be useful, too. That way, we can track engagement, and later on, we can return to revise our decision.
This is a great idea, unfortunately Discourse (the platform this forum is built on) doesn’t allow downvote functionality. We might be able to build it, but I don’t think that’s a responsible use of dev resources.
However, what we can do is add polls below each option. Martian colonists can then cast (unofficial) votes to show support or disagreement.
The above is a plugin for adding reactions to posts. This example shows that we can build some custom plugins, which is neat.
I’d offer to take on that task of building a custom plugin, but I really like your idea of using a poll since it’s already built in and it does allow us to express opinions more accurately and it captures engagement.
I have full support for the polls feature you suggested, and if over time we find it lacking, I’d be happy to build out a custom plugin.
That’s great, thanks for finding that. I actually think that specific plug-in would be great for just quality of life here on the forum, since reactions are fun.
As for building out downvotes, thanks for volunteering to help with that. If it gains some traction as a community interest, we can definitely connect about it.