Hiya folks! This is my first topic, and I’m one of those weird power Discourse users, who normally trigger warnings as a new user who configures their profile before posting and uses obviously too many URLs. But I’m in no hurry. 
Also, I’m @maiki (the @ is silent) (
), a longtime WordPress user/developer/manager, among other things, and I ultimately wish to stop using the “WordPress medium” (the extended ecosystem, which I don’t feel is a healthy environment for me).
I am also slow and was just reading on the blog from September how the #governance:petitions were moved to here, which is very agreeable to me, as I have an obnoxious amount of experience basically breaking the Discourse Voting plugin (which we all know is how one comes to understand and appreciate a software system!). Now I am here and I have some suggestions to discuss, and hope they are useful. 
Okay, two main things, we’ll get the simple suggestion out of the way…
Maybe change the name for Votes
These two categories are very similar:
- #governance:petitions
- Votes
From the perspective of seeing them on the front page:
What I thought “Votes” was is related to my next point, at the moment it’s description is not yet filled in, so upon viewing the contents of the category I propose calling it “Polls” or “Polling” or something else descriptive of nature of the voting going on there. It’s very useful to have a space where the voting mechanism may differ, but the “Votes” has more presence in the UI in the “Petitions” category, so ya know… let’s simplify!
Okay, so what I thought Votes was about…
Moving/archiving closed petitions to release votes
I once found myself with a massive amount of closed items that still retained their vote. I had been customizing views to more easily manage them, either to moderate them to release votes (this was the ancient past of the plugin), or to see things to actually vote on (when most of them are closed, there’s nothing to do for a would-be voter).
I made a feature request, but was given an alternative, which I’ve seen come up as the advice for how the voting plugin is “intended” to work:
Anyhow, when I sorted by votes (https://forums.classicpress.net/c/governance/petitions/77/l/latest?order=votes) I noticed some closed petitions, and read Closing petitions and taken all together I think we want to create another category to move closed petitions into. That will keep them from cluttering the topics that may be voted upon, while also triggering the hook for releasing votes back to the folks that voted.
Oh, and that’s what I thought Votes was, past records of petitions that made it to the top, or whatever. I think the criteria for how a petition is “closed” might change over time, so keep a general name might be prudent. For instance, “Closed Petitions”.