AI Insights: sentiment per post and the trend

How Feedjolt classifies each post as positive, neutral, or negative and charts the sentiment trend. Covers when it runs, visibility, plans, and limits.

What it is

Feedjolt automatically classifies the sentiment of every new post as POSITIVE, NEUTRAL, or NEGATIVE. Each classified post gets a small badge in the dashboard post list and detail view - a one-glance signal of how a user feels, not just what they said. The new AI Insights page (sidebar -> Triage -> AI insights, marked NEW) shows a stacked-area trend so you can spot whether your customers are getting happier or grumpier over time.

What sentiment means here

Sentiment is about the writer's emotional tone toward the product, not the topic. A bug report can be NEUTRAL (factual reporting) or NEGATIVE (frustration after the third re-report). A feature request can be NEUTRAL ("would be nice to have dark mode") or POSITIVE ("love this product! Just one suggestion: ...").

When sentiment is computed

Sentiment is classified once, when the post is created - by every channel (portal, dashboard form, email intake, Canny import, REST API). It is not re-computed when the body is edited or as comments accumulate. This keeps cost predictable and behavior easy to reason about.

A post may have no sentiment badge when:

The post is too short to classify confidently (fewer than 10 characters with no body).
The AI's confidence score is below 60%.
The post is spam, draft, or merged into another post.
The AI provider was unavailable or returned malformed output.

In all these cases the badge is simply hidden - no error is shown.

Visibility

Sentiment is admin-only. End users browsing your portal never see sentiment badges on their own or others' posts. This is a deliberate design choice - sentiment is a triage signal for your team, not a public attribute.

Required plan

AI Insights and the sentiment badge are advanced-AI features: they're on Startup and Scale (not Growth). Workspaces on Growth see an upgrade prompt on the AI Insights page; existing posts continue to display whatever sentiment was already computed (data is not deleted on plan change).

The trend chart

The AI Insights page uses the last 7 / 30 / 90 days (switchable). Empty days are zeros, so two classified days never become a triangle.

If fewer than eight posts in the window are classified, Insights does not draw a stacked area. You see the counts, a list of posts in the window, and a Classify remaining posts action when some rows are still uncomputed. Each row opens the existing post detail.

With eight or more classified posts, the stacked-area chart comes back. The list and classify action stay.

The chart counts posts, not votes. A 200-vote post counts the same as a 1-vote post. Vote-weighted measures belong to the priority-score feature (coming in a later release).

Board post lists have a Sentiment filter (positive, neutral, negative, unclassified) so you can triage frustrated users first.

Negative first

Insights puts negative posts in a queue for the selected window. Open a post, or jump to that board's inbox with Sentiment already set to Negative.

Suggested merges

If Feedjolt already stored a merge suggestion for a post in the window, Insights shows the pair. Review merge opens the same confirm dialog as the board. Insights does not auto-merge. It reads stored candidates. It does not run a new model to invent suggestions. See How do I auto-merge duplicate feature requests?.

Backfilling existing posts

When sentiment is enabled for the first time on a workspace with existing posts, those posts have no sentiment until classified. Use Classify remaining posts on AI Insights. That queues the same background job that runs on create, for up to 100 uncomputed posts at a time. Thin, draft, spam, and merged posts still skip. If you need a larger one-shot run, write to [email protected].

Limitations

Frozen at create. Sentiment doesn't shift as a thread heats up. A post that lands neutral but accumulates 50 angry comments still shows NEUTRAL.
Body truncated to 2000 characters. Very long posts are summarized by their first 2000 chars only.
Cost-aware skip. If a workspace exhausts its monthly AI quota, new posts receive no sentiment until the quota resets.
Multilingual. The classifier is given posts in any language; performance is generally good for the supported workspace locales (English, Spanish, Catalan), but quality may vary.
Small classification delay. Badges appear within seconds of post creation, not instantly - usually 5 to 15 seconds while the background job runs. Refresh the page if you don't see one yet.

Triage - how to act on negative-sentiment posts quickly.
How do I auto-merge duplicate feature requests? - opt-in auto-merge, or a stored suggestion a person confirms.
Merging - when several negative posts point at the same issue.

AI Insights & Sentiment