Website request - upvoting on forum

What do you need?

Ability to upvote a thread/post from the original post, probably upvote icon near the others?

Why

Today only replies can be upvoted (and posts, which are on the blog and not posthog.com/questions). The only way a thread gets recognized as good is for someone else's reply to be marked as the resolution, which credits the answerer, not the person who started it. There's currently no mechanism by which starting a good thread is recognized at all.

As the forum shifts toward discussion, more threads won't have an "answer," so they'd have no signal of quality or interest whatsoever. Post upvotes also give us a ranking signal that isn't recency or reply count, and a low-friction way to participate for people who aren't ready to post.

Note on scope

This needs a backend change as well as frontend — replies have a vote data model, questions don't. We might want to consider creating multiple schema types as we move the forum to a more conversation piece. FOr instance, articles (1 to many sharing), discussions (not a single right answer, but multiple replies, used to inform or survey not "solve") vs questions (solved or not by an answer)

Decisions needed

• Downvotes on posts — yes or no? Replies have them. Downvoting a question reads very differently from downvoting an answer, and risks discouraging the hesitant first-time posters we want more of. Recommend upvotes only.
• Does the vote count affect ordering on /questions, or is it display-only for now? (I recommend display only for now, but it should be something we can query so i can analyze this later.)
• Self-voting — blocked, or allowed but not counted?
• Can you upvote a locked or archived thread? (I recommend no)
• Existing threads all start at zero, or backfill something? (Recommend zero.)

Constraints from the points work

When you create a question/post and it's upvoted, you should get a point for that because it's showing that you've created something others are interested in reading and learning about. Two things need to be true for that to work:

• Un-upvoting must reverse cleanly — otherwise upvote → collect → un-upvote → repeat is a trivial farm.
• Self-votes must not count.

Downvotes must not deduct points — reputation can go negative, but points are a wallet with real merch attached, and a balance can't go below what's already been redeemed.