Voting is the point of a feature board. Visitors browse the requests from the widget's roadmap tab, see the tally, and add their vote with one click. This article explains how the flow works and what you need in place first.
What you need in place
- A Feature Request board with at least one public column, and at least one ticket in it.
- That board picked under Brand → (your brand) → Chat widget → Features → Roadmap, with Show on Navbar switched on.
- The Yaplet widget installed on your site.
The tab does not appear on its own — the roadmap board picker and that switch are what put it in the widget's bottom navigation. You can rename it there too, with Menu Title.
The voting flow
- A visitor opens the widget and taps the roadmap tab.
- They browse the requests, most-voted first, and can switch the order to Most recent.
- They click the upvote arrow on a request they care about.
- First vote only: a box asks for their email address. It is remembered in their browser for seven days and saved to their visitor record, so they are not asked again.
- The vote registers, the count goes up, and the arrow changes to show they have voted.
Why an email address is asked for
It is what makes a vote count for something. Votes are stored against the email address, one per person per request, so nobody can inflate a number by clicking repeatedly or reopening the page. A visitor who will not give an email cannot vote — deliberately, so the tallies mean what they look like they mean.
Be careful what you promise around it, though: Yaplet does not currently email voters by itself when a request moves. See Telling voters a feature shipped for what you actually have to do.
Removing a vote
Clicking the arrow a second time removes the vote and the count goes back down. Nothing else changes.
Imported requests always start at zero
If you bring a board in from Trello, Canny or a spreadsheet, the votes do not come with it — even when the file contains a number. Every Yaplet vote is a real email address attached to a real request, and inventing those would mean inventing people. Imported requests start at zero and build up again from your own visitors. See Moving boards in and out of Yaplet.
Where the counts show up
Vote counts are visible to every visitor, both in the widget tab and on the public roadmap page, and they drive the default ordering in both. In your dashboard the count is not printed on the kanban card — it is on the public page and in exports.