Voting System

The voting system is the heart of Community Questions. It helps surface the best content and rewards contributors with reputation points.

How Voting Works

Upvoting Content:

• Click the Upvote button on questions or answers you find helpful
• Upvotes signal quality and usefulness to the community
• Content authors earn +10 reputation points per upvote
• Click again to remove your upvote

Vote Score:

• Displayed next to each question and answer
• Shows total upvotes received
• Higher scores indicate more helpful content

Question and answer details show the exact vote total. Lists, macros, search results, and rankings use a synchronized Confluence property, so their count or ordering can briefly lag after a vote.

Reputation System

Reputation points measure your contribution to the community:

Accepted Answers

Question authors have a special power: marking the best answer.

Accepting an Answer:

1. Navigate to your question
2. Review the answers provided
3. Click the Accept Answer checkmark on the best answer
4. Only one answer can be accepted per question

Benefits:

• Highlights the solution that worked
• Answer author receives +15 reputation points
• Accepted answers appear at the top of the answer list
• Helps others find solutions quickly

Changing Accepted Answers:

• You can change which answer is accepted at any time
• The previous answer author loses 15 points
• The new answer author gains 15 points

Users & Profiles

Track contributors and view activity in your space:

Users Tab:

1. Go to the Users tab in Community Questions
2. Browse the ranked contributor list or search by name
3. See each contributor's rank, avatar, reputation points, and a You marker for your own account
4. Click any contributor to view their profile

User Profiles:

Click a user's name to view their profile, which includes:

• Total reputation points
• Recent activity - Latest questions, answers, and edits, with activity type, space, votes, and accepted state
• Top questions - Their highest-voted questions, clearly labeled as questions
• Top answers - Their highest-voted answers, prefixed with Answered: and clearly labeled as answers

Vote totals are shown only where the current viewer has permission to see them. Accepted markers identify resolved questions and accepted answers. Profiles show a Global or Space context so the scope of the reputation value is clear.

Voting Rules

• You cannot upvote your own content (buttons are disabled)
• You can remove your upvote at any time by clicking the button again
• Vote totals on the detail page update immediately; projected list and reputation totals normally follow shortly

Storage, Privacy, and Export

Individual vote relationships and vote-derived reputation are stored by Community Questions in its Microsoft Azure SQL database. Questions and answers remain Confluence custom content, and the displayed vote-count property remains on that content.

If Atlassian closes a user's account, Community Questions removes that user's identity from their votes. Those votes remain in the total as unattributed votes, so content scores and earned author reputation do not change.