@timshuwy can we get a little clarity on how this expiration works? We see things with only a couple votes get implemented, and this with 11 is now expired. Who decides what moves and what’s expired? Is it automated?
Not to pile on but this morning I was looking at an idea that had 70 votes and it was marked expired and not enough interest.
They just automatically expire if the status hasn’t been changed after a certain amount of time regardless of how many votes they have.
The expiration process is automated. The current rules are:
- Ideas more than one year old with fewer than four organization votes may expire.
- Ideas more than two years old with fewer than eleven organization votes may expire.
The key distinction is that these are organization votes, not individual user votes.
Each customer organization may have multiple employees vote for an idea, but for expiration purposes, those votes represent one organization. We use that approach because we sometimes see an idea created and then receive 15 to 20 votes from employees of the same company within an hour. That demonstrates strong interest within that company, but it does not necessarily demonstrate broad demand across the customer base.
@chaddb, I reviewed the idea you referenced with more than 70 votes. That idea was split into several smaller, more specific ideas, all of which were linked from the original. The consolidated idea was then closed because it had effectively become a duplicate of those replacement ideas. There are several other expired ideas in the same situation.
That said, labeling those ideas as “Expired, Not Enough Interest” is misleading when the actual reason was that the idea was split, replaced, or duplicated. We should provide clearer closure reasons so that customers can understand what happened without having to investigate each idea individually.
Other ideas have vote totals such as 29 votes from 8 organizations. Brandon’s example has 11 votes from 9 organizations. That one is close to the threshold, but it has also had very little activity for an extended period.
An expired idea can be resubmitted if the need still exists. Resubmitting brings the topic back into current visibility and allows us to determine whether it gains renewed support across additional organizations. When doing so, it is useful to link the previous idea so the history and prior discussion are preserved, and the former vote count can be merged into the new idea.
There is no hidden process or conspiracy here. However, we do periodically need to clean up the backlog so that active ideas with broad customer demand are not buried beneath thousands of old or inactive submissions.
The legitimate criticism is that we need to be clearer about why an idea was closed. “Not enough interest,” “duplicate,” and “replaced by more specific ideas” are different outcomes and should be communicated that way in the administrative notes.
Below is the idea reference by @Banderson showing the activity over time.
They don’t. I’ve been keeping notes. Expiration isn’t concurrent with increasing volume, and proceeds in sudden great lurches at random intervals that have roughly been 2-6 months apart. Even if there’s a script that ‘expires’ ideas, it’s clearly not running unattended.
| date | total | sub | gauging | dev | dup | exp |
|------------+-------+------+---------+-----+-----+------|
| 2026-01-05 | 12918 | 1581 | 6189 | 182 | 778 | 3664 |
| 2026-01-30 | 12983 | 1590 | 6226 | 162 | 778 | 3698 | <-- small jump
| 2026-02-23 | 13077 | 1102 | 5859 | 162 | 781 | 4640 | <-- great big lurch
| 2026-02-25 | 13092 | 1092 | 5882 | 162 | 781 | 4641 |
| 2026-03-06 | 13110 | 936 | 6033 | 162 | 785 | 4649 |
| 2026-03-25 | 13187 | 931 | 6120 | 163 | 785 | 4648 | <-- lol one got unexpired
| 2026-04-09 | 13268 | 953 | 6131 | 166 | 786 | 4685 | <-- small jump
| 2026-05-01 | 13357 | 950 | 6216 | 174 | 788 | 4680 | <-- 5 got dumpster dived
| 2026-06-05 | 13479 | 967 | 6302 | 192 | 791 | 4677 | <-- good stuff in this dumpster lol
| 2026-07-10 | 13613 | 953 | 6153 | 185 | 792 | 4978 | <-- another big lurch
I could also point out that we are not hiding the fact that we marked it expired… (that is an option)… instead, we allow the ideas portal to notify the creator that the idea has been expired.
The other options that Aha ALLOWS is for us to expire the idea and hide it, expire and delete it… we did neither of these… the ideas are still visible to everyone (search for expired ideas) and you can see the admin reason comment that is added automatically when the auto expire happens.
None of the links for the split out ideas work. Even if I just put the idea numbers into the URL. Maybe Epicor can update the links or something.
Noted and fixed… someone else did all the linking and we sometimes forget that the link for people outside epicor needs to be the web version and not the native Aha! version. I have relinked, and made the ideas visible (yes they were not visible either). Up until several weeks ago, i was not in charge of Epicor Ideas for the UX (although I had access)… but now, I am taking it over, so there are changes being made.