Did Java do this first?

I recently submitted a bug through the Jira bug tracking software and I noticed a reference to bug voting. hmm bug voting, I remember that. It is also in bugzilla too, I trawled through the history of bugzilla voting and it mentions revzilla but even that doesn't extend that far back. I googled for more but drew a blank.

So where did this all come from? I would like to vote that it was a Java first from one of my old managers at Sun, Scott Rautmann. Scott came up with many great ideas and also empowered folks to act on them. He even turned down a director position (when director positions at Sun were hard to come by). Anyway, when Java appeared there was no way to prioritize that a bug was extra special because it came from a paying licensee, say IBM. So they introduced a points scoring mechanism to "weight" the bug higher. I had just pushed all the Java bugs onto the Java developer website (after multiple meetings to convince the Javasoft management that this was a good thing) in 1996. Sun had never published bugs like this before and very few other companies did (Microsoft were especially shy)

Scott suggested that we weight those bugs too so we could tell if a bug was popular or not and with the help from Tony Squier and Rick Levine, who came up with the name, "Bug Parade" was born.

Unfortunately or fortunately Scott decided to semi-retire in Hawaii soon after that so only really saw this and many other ideas from afar.

So do you know of an earlier public bug voting system? If so let me and everyone else know that they were really first!