When you put a text field on a public website, some people try to abuse it. They’ll try to post spam and other dubious content.
Add a voting system to a public website text field, and even more people will try to abuse it.
This is why we have several mechanisms in place to protect your feedback boards.
We hide these protection mechanisms from our customers, as we feel it is our job to keep your feedback board running smoothly. It is our job to protect your feedback board from the bad actors on the Internet.
In recent months, however, we’ve concluded that there is one protection mechanism which we should make configurable by board admins – throttling.
Our throttling system detects when too many votes come too quickly for a suggestion, and starts silently ignoring some of them.
Our experience is that in almost every case, our default throttling levels are suitable.
There are some scenarios, however, where you might need to change throttling levels.
- You announce your feature board via email newsletter or social media to a large amount of people, who are likely to arrive and vote at around the same time. You can reduce throttling on the day the email newsletter is sent or the announcement is made, then return to strict throttling the day after.
- All your users are within one physical building of your organisation, and appear to our servers as all having the same IP address. In this case, you can choose a looser throttling level.
- Your board is private and you trust all users with access to your board.
The throttling system normally works superbly, but it sometimes gets triggered when you get a sudden spike of visitors that you were actually expecting.
The typical symptom of this incorrect triggering is that your new suggestions seemingly get stuck at 50 votes. They’re not actually stuck, they’re just temporarily ignoring votes until the traffic level subsides.
You can now control how strict you want the vote throttling to be – or turn it off altogether.