How voting works
Anyone can vote, one stamp per browser or account. Launch totals come from seeded placeholder accounts, so they are not yet verified public counts.
Where a count comes from today
Anyone can vote without an account. An unsigned vote is one per browser, recorded against a token that never leaves the device in the clear, and it counts on the public board the same way a signed-in vote does. A signed-in vote is one per account, so it follows you to another device. The launch boards are the exception: their counts are example figures we set so a new board is not empty, not votes anybody cast, which is why they sit in the tens rather than the thousands. Your own vote is added on top.
Posting a suggestion or a comment needs an account, so a conversation can be attributed. Voting does not.
The requests on the launch boards are examples we wrote to show what a board looks like in use. They are not real user posts and they are not claims about what anybody has asked these companies for. The accounts carrying them are placeholders, and they are removable in one operation without touching anything a real visitor has posted.
Duplicates are merged, not deleted
Two requests for the same thing split the count and make it look like nobody cares. When we merge them the votes and comments move into one request, and the closed one keeps a link to where it went, so an old link never dead-ends.
As you type a new suggestion we look for the same thing already on the board and show it to you, with its vote stamp live in the form. Voting on what exists is nearly always better than posting the same thing again.
Safeguards required for production
- A signed-in vote counts once per account and idea. An unsigned vote counts once per browser and idea.
- A database uniqueness constraint will prevent more than one counted vote per account and idea, and per browser token and idea.
- Mutations will use idempotency keys, server validation and privacy-conscious rate limits.
- Suspicious bursts will be reviewable without giving companies control of totals.
What companies can and cannot do
A verified team can reply, move a status, merge duplicates and decline with a reason. A verified team cannot delete a request because they dislike it, edit somebody else's words, or hide the vote count. Declining is public and keeps its reason on the record.
What each status commits a company to
A status is a promise, so what each one means is published rather than left to interpretation.
- Suggested
- Posted and open for votes. Nobody from the company has looked at it yet.
- Under review
- The team has read it and is deciding. They have committed to an answer, not to building it.
- Planned
- It is going to be built. No date is promised until it moves to in progress.
- In progress
- Someone is building it now.
- Shipped
- Released. The date it shipped is on the record.
- Declined
- The team has said no, with a public reason that stays on the page.
Trending is not the same as top
Top is the raw count. Trending divides the count by how long the idea has been up, so something four days old with two thousand votes can outrank something two years old with ten thousand. Both are shown, and the sort you are looking at is always named.