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SubJunk
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At the moment, the vote count on the main page seems to only take the votes from the first post.
I've had users contact me because they expected it to display the sum of the votes from all the comments in the discussion.I would expect the same thing, and had assumed it did that until I looked.
Is this by design?
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I guess it is by design, as it shows the votes given to the discussion itself, not to the comments it received. It makes sense, to me.
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I think that would make more sense if the first comment were different to the discussion. For example, the longer a discussion goes on, the less likely it is that the first post is relevant to the most recent ones. What if someone likes the thread but not the first post? Then they have to decide whether they like the thread enough to overcome their dislike of the first post and it's a compromise. Just my thoughts anyway.
On forums like this it makes sense because it's mostly question-answer, so if people found the question useful they upvote the original comment.
However on less formal forums there might be a thread like "Your favorite TV show", where people post about the shows they like. The first post goes on about My Little Pony, which in this example you don't like, but the next 100 posts have shows you really like, so you like the thread as a whole but not the original post.
The issue is that, if the opening post (i.e. the discussion) received 10 votes, the first comment received 5 and the second comment received 3, it doesn't mean that the whole thread received 18 votes. There is no "absolutely right" way to display a vote count; the choice of displaying the votes for the opening post is an acceptable compromise.
Of course, it's always possible to modify the plugin to count all the votes. Just keep in mind that the calculation would span across multiple entities and could become slow if a discussion receives a lot of comments.
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To me it seems intuitive that the discussion does have 18 votes in the case you mentioned. It seems it's just a matter of personal preference.
My experience is probably shaped by the Vanilla 1 plugin "Community Moderation", which worked the way I described.
Anyway yeah I will make the feature. It doesn't need to be any slower because I will use a new database field in the discussion table called ScoreTotal that is updated whenever a user votes on a comment in that discussion.