Voting, duplicates and merged posts

Votes are one of the inputs into what gets built. They are not the only one — a bug that loses work outranks a popular convenience — but they are the clearest signal of how many people a gap actually costs.

Voting requires a sign-in

Guest voting is off, and not as a barrier for its own sake: an anonymous vote can never be notified, so the person who cared enough to vote would never hear that the thing shipped. A vote nobody can write back to is worth less to you and less to us.

Why upvoting beats reposting

Three separate posts describing the same gap read as three unrelated items until someone merges them. One post with three votes reads as what it is. Search before you post; if you find something close, vote on it and add what is different about your case as a comment.

What merging does

Near-identical posts are merged rather than deleted. The votes move to the surviving post and so do you — the notification you would have received on your own post arrives on the one that survives, and you are told which post that is.

If a merge was wrong, and your case really is a different problem, say so on the surviving post. Asking for it to be split back out is a normal thing to ask.

What votes do not do

They do not buy a date, and they do not override a decision record. The most-voted request on the board can still be answered Not planned, with the reason written out, if it contradicts something the project has settled deliberately.

Comments

A comment is often worth more than a vote, because it says why. Comments are held for review before they appear, exactly like posts, and the same rule governs what goes in them: describe the behaviour, and never paste repository contents, paths, keys, or session strings.