Ideas is where you collect feature requests. Your Public board is a public page where your users vote on ideas, suggest new ones, leave comments, and see where each idea stands. It gives your product team a direct signal of user demand — no surveys or manual aggregation required.
Key Features
- Voting — Users upvote the ideas they care about. Votes are a first-class signal: sort by most votes to see what your users want most.
- Suggestions — Users can submit new ideas with a title and description directly from the public board.
- Comments and replies — Threaded discussions on each idea. Your team replies from the dashboard (shown as Team) and users can reply.
- Tag filtering — Assign tags to ideas in the dashboard. Users can filter the public board by tag to find relevant ideas.
- Status tracking — Ideas move through a visible lifecycle so users know what's being worked on.
- Public responses — Attach a public-facing response to any idea to communicate decisions or progress.
- Merge duplicates — Combine duplicate ideas so votes are consolidated onto the canonical version.
Accessing the Public Board
Every project has a dedicated public board URL based on its project key. You can share the direct link, embed it as an iframe, or pass an authentication token for verified user access.
Find your project key in the SeggWat dashboard under Settings > General.
Use ?embed=true when embedding the public board in an iframe on your own site. It removes the outer page chrome and adjusts spacing for embedded layouts.
Idea Lifecycle
Ideas follow a defined status progression. Statuses are visible to users on the public board so they always know where an idea stands.
| Status | Visible to all users | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | No (submitter only) | Newly suggested, awaiting team review. Only shown to the person who submitted it. |
| Open | Yes | Accepted and open for votes and discussion |
| Planned | Yes | Confirmed for a future release |
| Started (shown as In progress) | Yes | Actively being worked on |
| Completed | Yes (via filter) | Shipped |
| Declined | Yes (via filter) | Will not be built. Consider adding an admin response explaining why. |
| Duplicate | Yes (via filter) | Merged into another idea. Votes and comments are consolidated on the canonical version. |
The board's default list shows only ideas that can still be voted on (Open, Planned, In progress). Completed, Declined and Duplicate ideas stay reachable through the board's status filter and by direct link; the same default applies to GET /api/v1/p/{key}/ideas.
Planned, In progress and Completed ideas also appear on your public roadmap. The status dropdown in the dashboard explains each status and says which ones show on the roadmap.
Whether new suggestions go directly to Open or start as Pending is controlled by the Auto-Approve setting in your public board configuration. See Portal Customization for details.
Typical Flows
Managing Ideas in the Dashboard
Open Public board in your project sidebar; the Ideas tab lists every idea. The header links to your live public board and public roadmap (icon buttons on small screens).
Filtering and Search
Use the filter bar at the top of the list to narrow down ideas by:
- Status — Active (Pending, Open, Planned, In progress), Completed, Dismissed (Declined, Duplicate, Rejected), or All
- Tag — Any tag assigned to ideas in the dashboard
- Search — Full-text search across idea titles and descriptions
Updating an Idea
Open any idea to:
- Change the status — Use the status dropdown to move the idea along its lifecycle
- Add a public response — Write a public-facing message that appears on the public board below the idea's description. Use this to explain decisions, share timelines, or acknowledge the idea
- Add or remove tags — Keep your list organized and make board filtering useful
- Reply to comments — Post a reply under Comments; it appears on the public board as Team
- Edit the title or description — Correct typos or clarify the idea without losing its vote history
Merging Duplicate Ideas
When users suggest the same thing independently, merge the duplicate into the idea you want to keep so votes and discussion land in one place:
Select the duplicate
In the Ideas list, open the idea that should go away.
Click Merge into…
Use Merge into… in the detail panel or on the idea's page. Picking Duplicate from the status dropdown opens the same dialog.
Pick the idea to keep
Search your project's ideas and select the canonical one. Ideas that were themselves merged away can't be chosen.
Merge
Votes move to the canonical idea (someone who backed both counts once), and the comment thread moves with them. The duplicate stays reachable on the public board as Duplicate with a "Merged into" link to the idea you kept.
Creating GitHub Issues from Ideas
If you have the GitHub integration set up, you can push ideas directly to your repository:
- Open any idea in the dashboard
- Click Create GitHub Issue
- The issue is created with the idea's title, description, vote count, tags, and a link back to SeggWat
When the GitHub issue is closed, the idea's status automatically updates to Completed. When reopened, it returns to Started. See GitHub Integration for setup instructions.
Custom Board Branding
Customize your public board's title, welcome message, accent color, logo, and background color from Settings > Public Board > Public board & email branding in your project. See Portal Customization for all available options.
Authentication
The public board is always publicly viewable — anyone with the link can browse ideas, comments, and statuses. Who can act (vote, suggest, comment) is set per project under Settings > Public Board > Public visitor voting:
| Policy | Who can act |
|---|---|
| Anonymous allowed (default) | Any visitor — a browser identifier is enough, no sign-in required |
| Require email verification | Visitors confirm their email with a one-time code first (see below) |
| Disabled | No public actions; only token-authenticated visitors can act |
A visitor arriving with a signed authentication token always bypasses these gates and acts with a verified identity. See End-User Authentication for step-by-step JWT setup in Node.js, Python, PHP, and Go.
Email Verification (No Integration Required)
When the policy requires verification — or when a visitor who doesn't use your app's sign-in wants a verified identity — the board offers a built-in, passwordless flow: the visitor enters their email, receives a 6-digit code, and enters it to confirm. Nothing to set up on your side; they only need access to their inbox. Verified visitors stay signed in on that browser for about 30 days.
My Activity
Once a visitor is identified — by a signed token or by verifying their email — they get a personal My activity page at /p/YOUR_PROJECT_KEY/me showing:
- My ideas — everything they've suggested, with live status
- Following — ideas they've voted on
- My feedback — feedback they sent through the widget, with team replies
Anonymous visitors who open /me are prompted to verify their email to unlock it.
Browser Agent Tools (WebMCP)
Some browsers can now let an AI assistant act on the page a visitor is looking at, through the WebMCP proposal. Your board publishes a small set of tools to that assistant, so a visitor browsing with an agent can ask it to "find whether anyone has already asked for dark mode, and upvote it if so" instead of scrolling and clicking.
The tools cover the board itself: read the board's context, search and read ideas, vote and unvote, suggest an idea, comment on one, read the changelog, and move the visitor to another board page.
Two things make this safe to leave on:
- It's the visitor's own identity, not a key. Every tool call goes through the same public API the board's own buttons call, same-origin, with the visitor's own credential — their session, signed token, or browser identifier. An agent can do exactly what the person at the keyboard could do by clicking, and nothing more.
- Your policies still apply. The voting and submission policies above gate agent calls exactly as they gate clicks. On a board that requires email verification, an agent's vote is rejected until the visitor verifies through the board's own prompt — the agent is told to ask them, and has no way around it.
This is on by default. Turn it off for a project under Settings > Public Board > Browser agent tools (WebMCP). Browsers without WebMCP support simply see nothing.