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"Votebox" like feature


Luke

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Do you remember the days when there was a forum for reporting bugs? You know, before the bug tracker? Well the bug tracker has definitely helped out in making bug tracking more efficient.... But feature suggestions are still kept in the feedback forum. A few dozen people may reply to it, but that topic quickly fades away. A suggestion isn't really taken seriously unless enough people post other topics suggesting the same thing, or staff take particular interest in a suggestion. Another problem is that people tend to lump multiple suggestions in one topic.

What I'm suggesting is a new community project, or extension to the existing tracker, for suggesting features, much like Votebox, which is Dropbox's customized feature tracking system.

Since you have to be logged in to see it I've taken a screen shot below:

post-57416-080635100 1275594091_thumb.pn

The way they're system works is someone makes a single suggestion and people vote on it. The ones with the highest votes are at the top, and ones that are accepted/done get filtered out. They give their customers 5 votes total towards a particular feature that they want most. Later on they can choose to cancel that vote and put it towards another suggestion, or it's returned to them when a feature is accepted/completed. (There may be some details I may have gotten slightly wrong, but you get the general gist of it).

It would be a great way to gauge what people want most. Limiting how many votes each customer gets allows them to vote for what they want most (otherwise people would vote for everything, and then it would be pointless).

(If the same feature is suggested twice there should be a way to merge them together)

Would be more efficient than "+1 or Yes I agree!" stuff.

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It's the right forum. Don't worry, no one responds to my suggestions either (but maybe that's because they suck :P).

Anyways, I think it's a good idea and would like to see something such as this. It'll definitely organise the suggestions and offer an easy way to see the most desired features. But why do I feel like this wouldn't be done? :blink:

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If enough people are interested it will be. The same thing happened with the bug tracker. Bugs and suggestions went into one forum. I remember telling them that it would be much easier if they had a bug tracker. The problem was using another existing bug tracker would mean another account to login to. Eventually the tracker was made :). A similar problem exists with feature suggestions... They get lost easily, and end up getting re-posted.... This would better organize them.

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%7Boption%7D

Damn. I was just posting about how feature requests are handled internally and was about to suggest something like this.

I totally dig this. There needs to be some sort of structure for the categories (User Management, Post Modification, Private Message features, Moderation features, ACP, etc.)

And once a suggestion has been made there needs a way to add comments to it, not just voting. This would allow users to refine the idea.

And it would give aspiring mod programmers a place to look at for suggestions.

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I really cannot see any severe cons to this. Of course you could argue about which technical implementation is ideal, but I feel that it would be a benefit to all.

bfarber mentioned that as of now the Dev Team keeps track of suggestions off-site, gauging how often something is brought up and what priority it might have. Browsing the suggestions and keeping the internal "list" sure eats manhours. So if this process can be a) refined b) improved and basically automated by creating a place where reasonable suggestions are put up for user vote it saves time on the teams side.

It would most likely create a more accurate reflection of what exactly it is the customers want.

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Personally, I just don't see the need. The only reason we have an off-site list is so we can have a condensed list of "top picks". No matter what automated system you try to use, you still need to determine your "top picks" using some method, and making a list that devs can discuss is a very basic normal step. I think no matter how we accept feature suggestions, we'll still do that.

Personally, adding a new system just to post a feature suggestion seems unnecessary to me.

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While I would like a way to make feature suggestions easier to manage, I think that if you spend more time organising your work than working, you're probably doing something wrong.

Kind of like when I see companies spend money on fancy bug trackers, time implementing SSO with the current systems, etc. I find it laughable.

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  • 9 months later...

While I would like a way to make feature suggestions easier to manage, I think that if you spend more time organising your work than working, you're probably doing something wrong.



Kind of like when I see companies spend money on fancy bug trackers, time implementing SSO with the current systems, etc. I find it laughable.




You can get this functionality from UserVoice.com... takes 5 minutes to setup. If that is too long to ensure the features you are adding are based on customer feedback/requests, you're probably doing something wrong.
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