Topic voting and sort topics by upvotes

[Interferon]

I would like to see a feature that allows users to vote for an entire topic itself, and the ability to sort topics by the number of upvotes. In my case this would be used to measure aggregate feedback for feature requests for our products.

When you have a large number of equally important customers it is difficult to get an accurate gauge of what people think it important. We have thousands of feature requests with no ability to track how important each item is to our community.

Many third-party tools exist:
https://www.feedbear.com/blog/feature-voting-tools

The problem with third-party tools:

• My users do not want to navigate to another website and register a separate account, so participation is extremely low.
• No ability to restrict feature requests to paying customers only, or to even tell if the participants are my users at all.
• $300 annually is a lot to pay just to have a sorted list of topics.
• To justify their expense they add extra unwanted features like "roadmaps".

Edited July 29 by Interferon

[Interferon]

This would make it easy to tell at glance what the whole community cares about, including the majority who are too shy to start a topic, but have enough courage to upvote a request. (I'm not joking, people really do behave like this.)

It would make it a lot easier to communicate to the vocal minorities why their niche feature requests are not as important as they think they are.

Our product updates would make more sense to people because they could see that feature X was in high demand from other users, instead of our announcements just being a random list of things they weren't expecting.

Edited July 29 by Interferon