[Sugg] Community Ranking of Submitted Suggestions

[Metsfanmax]

Concise description:

• Add a ranking system to the list of currently submitted suggestions, so that the community can publicize their preference for which suggestions are the most urgent

Specifics/Details:

• Use an "upvote" system to determine suggestion popularity
• A list of all submitted suggestions is maintained by the Suggestions Moderators. Each CC user receives three "upvotes." Each of the upvotes may be given to one currently active suggestion; a user is not required to award all three upvotes.
• Voting may be done from, say, a separate web-page where people can check off up to three active suggestions they like, or from inside the Submitted Suggestions forum if a suitable phpBB extension can be found.
• The Suggestions Moderators maintain an ordered list of the submitted suggestions with the number of upvotes they have.
• If an alternate ranking system can be used and integrated into phpBB in an easier fashion, that's fine too.

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:

• Currently, there is no good way for the webmaster to determine what the community feels are the most important and/or urgent suggestions. It is true that many of the submitted suggestions have informal polls showing who supports them and who is opposed to them, but these polls suffer from a serious self-selection bias: only the people who check out the thread and care about the issue usually vote. Furthermore, these internal polls give no method of determining which of the suggestions is actually the most important to the community at large. With the current system, the webmaster is essentially forced to make an educated guess about what the community wants (or, base his selection on some other set of criteria). With the added ranking system, the webmaster would have a valuable piece of information about which suggestions the community feels are most urgent, in addition to which suggestions have the most clear consensus.
• In this way the system will become more transparent, and remove some of the confusion regarding exactly how suggestions are chosen to be implemented. While the webmaster may not always side with the community on which order to implement suggestions, it certainly can only be a benefit for him to have some idea of what the community cares about most.

[sniffie]

Concise description:

• Add a ranking system to the list of currently submitted suggestions, so that the community can publicize their preference for which suggestions are the most urgent

Specifics/Details:

• Use an "upvote" system to determine suggestion popularity
• A list of all submitted suggestions is maintained by the Suggestions Moderators. Each CC user receives three "upvotes." Each of the upvotes may be given to one currently active suggestion; a user is not required to award all three upvotes.
• Voting may be done from, say, a separate web-page where people can check off up to three active suggestions they like, or from inside the Submitted Suggestions forum if a suitable phpBB extension can be found.
• The Suggestions Moderators maintain an ordered list of the submitted suggestions with the number of upvotes they have.
• If an alternate ranking system can be used and integrated into phpBB in an easier fashion, that's fine too.

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:

• Currently, there is no good way for the webmaster to determine what the community feels are the most important and/or urgent suggestions. It is true that many of the submitted suggestions have informal polls showing who supports them and who is opposed to them, but these polls suffer from a serious self-selection bias: only the people who check out the thread and care about the issue usually vote. Furthermore, these internal polls give no method of determining which of the suggestions is actually the most important to the community at large. With the current system, the webmaster is essentially forced to make an educated guess about what the community wants (or, base his selection on some other set of criteria). With the added ranking system, the webmaster would have a valuable piece of information about which suggestions the community feels are most urgent, in addition to which suggestions have the most clear consensus.
• In this way the system will become more transparent, and remove some of the confusion regarding exactly how suggestions are chosen to be implemented. While the webmaster may not always side with the community on which order to implement suggestions, it certainly can only be a benefit for him to have some idea of what the community cares about most.

hi,
I have some questions and comments about this suggestions
-Those 3 upvotes, for what period of time are they. Are they all 3 gone when you used them or will the "respawn" in lets say a year? Cause in this case you would be able to "push through" a suggestion just because you have a load of friends on CC
-How would you connect "the other website" on wich you vote with this forum?
-Whill the suggestions moderators make the list you suggested public? Or whill they keep it for themselves?
- How many votes are needed to implement a suggestion, and will a suggestion be put to use when this ammount off votes is reached?
-I am pretty confident the mods put all their backs into it implementing suggestions but it takes a very long time putting them to use.

Greetz sniff

[Metsfanmax]

-Those 3 upvotes, for what period of time are they. Are they all 3 gone when you used them or will the "respawn" in lets say a year? Cause in this case you would be able to "push through" a suggestion just because you have a load of friends on CC

The 3 votes are indefinite. You may have up to 3 upvotes active at any particular time. If a suggestion is implemented or otherwise removed from Submitted, then you get that vote back and can move it to something else.

-How would you connect "the other website" on wich you vote with this forum?

Ideally there would be a built-in mechanism in the forum where you could just click a link or button or something next to each thread. Barring that, it could just be stored somewhere on the server and be linked to from the Suggestions forum.

-Whill the suggestions moderators make the list you suggested public? Or whill they keep it for themselves?

I see no reason why it would be kept private. I would suggest that people could only see the vote tallies after they themselves voted, but other than that, people should know what the general consensus is.

- How many votes are needed to implement a suggestion, and will a suggestion be put to use when this ammount off votes is reached?

That wasn't how I intended the system. It was just supposed to be a running total. If there comes some time when lack decides it's time for a new feature, he looks in the Submitted forum and sees which one people want the most.

-I am pretty confident the mods put all their backs into it implementing suggestions but it takes a very long time putting them to use.

Of course they do - this is precisely why I'm proposing this function. It does take a significant amount of effort to put through a submitted suggestion in most cases. I think that if all that effort is going to be expended, it should be on the suggestions that the most people want, so that the largest number of CC denizens is positively affected by the implementation. I think most, if not all, of the suggestions currently in submitted would be valuable additions to the site, but since there's only a limited amount of hours in the day for the webmaster, we should be somewhat utilitarian here.

[IcePack]

Maybe you can tie this feature to premium purchases. Like, if you gift, purchase, etc a membership you get x3 votes. Every year or time u gift u get x3 more votes.

Maybe freemium get 1 vote or something. That way emphasis is given to lackattacks premium customers, who help pay the site. The more u purchase the more input u have on site moving forward.

Freemiums would still get a voice, or maybe x1 per year from their start date etc.

[Darwins_Bane]

Or we could do something really simple, like a topic at the top of the forum allowing you to vote three times. it would contain a list of the submitted suggs...just saying.

[Metsfanmax]

Or we could do something really simple, like a topic at the top of the forum allowing you to vote three times. it would contain a list of the submitted suggs...just saying.

This is true, if one of the moderators is willing to put in the time to record those votes. If the forum extension is too much work, I'd support this, it still captures the spirit of my suggestion.

[blakebowling]

Or we could do something really simple, like a topic at the top of the forum allowing you to vote three times. it would contain a list of the submitted suggs...just saying.

This is true, if one of the moderators is willing to put in the time to record those votes. If the forum extension is too much work, I'd support this, it still captures the spirit of my suggestion.

Maintaining the list would be more work than coding a mod that would track this (over time of course, the quick and dirty solution would be the list).

[Metsfanmax]

Bumping this to give it more life

[lethlethe]

I agree that there should be a system to showcase the suggestions to a broader audience (not only the people who check the actual subforum). On the mechanics of this, other are better judges than me. Still, the idea of a list presented to the whole community seems a good way to go. One easy way to do this would be:
1. let people make suggestions in the subforum like they do now. this could be something like the 'map foundry' but for ideas for the site: ideas are launched and then refined (if they need to be refined).
2. the moderators make a selection of a few of the best ideas (those with the post traffic or via a quick poll on the subforum)
3. on a regular basis (say every month of every two or more months, depending on schedule of the programmers of this site) that list of the 'best' suggestions are presented to the whole community (not just the subforum), advertised widely (e.g. via CC-twitter, the news letter or the announcement forum). Some sort of voting or debating system can be put in place (e.g. for every proposition there's several options: "yes, urgent", "yes, not urgent", "yes, but needs to be reworked" (back to the subforum), "no" (with the option to explain why not).
4. rejection or implementation of the suggestions by the developpers
5. because the whole community is confronted with the list of suggestions, members will start to think about them more and will be more tempted to formulate their own suggestions. This will increase the activity on the subforum. And... we're back at number 1.

[tarcellius]

This is a great idea. And if you leverage Google Moderator (http://www.google.com/moderator/) I think you can get something working fairly quickly and easily. Moderator is designed to do exactly what you're looking for, and it's free.

The only drawback is that you would not have control over who votes and how often. So you wouldn't be able to give 3 votes to people with premium accounts, for example, which is a good idea. Still, it's free and easy.

[Metsfanmax]

Thanks for the tip tarcellius. I was really hoping that we could get a phpBB mod installed to do this, because people are a lot more likely to actually vote when the system is in the forum, as opposed to going to an external site to vote. Still, I will keep this tool in mind.

[Qwert]

i think that 5 years waiting system, its much better, so you have chance after 5 years to be implemented,if lack aprove these sugestion

[PLAYER57832]

I am not sure this will help much of anything. I believe Lack, etc knows which suggestions they want to implement.

[tarcellius]

I am not sure this will help much of anything. I believe Lack, etc knows which suggestions they want to implement.

Somebody please tell me this isn't the attitude held by CC. Very few companies do well doing whatever they want rather than what their customers want.

[72o]

I was going to propose something similar and searched and found this. Just another suggestion moved to "rejected" with no explanation and no coherent negative response whatsoever.

[agentcom]

I was going to propose something similar and searched and found this. Just another suggestion moved to "rejected" with no explanation and no coherent negative response whatsoever.

I understand your frustration. I think a few of us moderators share it. A system for determining which suggestions get implemented has been proposed a few times. In fact, back in the day, there was a priority system, where updates were ranked 1-5, 5 being urgent and 1 being unimportant. That didn't really work that well and was done away with.

Lack has also tried to publish a "to do" list, but that also didn't work out very well, apparently. This was all before I was ever even on the site, so I can't speak much to the specifics.

I also agree that suggestions get dismissed too often without much explanation. Those of you who follow this forum, know that I try not to do that. I'd say the biggest problem with this looks like it would require either (1) coding or (2) a manually kept list, which both would take more time than the admins/mods wanted to put in.

Behind the scenes, I can tell you that there is some discussion for making the suggestions process more streamlined and consistent. The main problem we've run into is that every mod (remember: volunteers) does things at their own pace, so simple discussions can literally take months.

Thanks for finding this though, I'll add it to my index of suggestions/list of things to work on.

[Woodruff]

I was going to propose something similar and searched and found this. Just another suggestion moved to "rejected" with no explanation and no coherent negative response whatsoever.

I understand your frustration. I think a few of us moderators share it. A system for determining which suggestions get implemented has been proposed a few times. In fact, back in the day, there was a priority system, where updates were ranked 1-5, 5 being urgent and 1 being unimportant. That didn't really work that well and was done away with.

Lack has also tried to publish a "to do" list, but that also didn't work out very well, apparently. This was all before I was ever even on the site, so I can't speak much to the specifics.

The problem in both cases was lackattack himself in my opinion, unfortunately.

[patrickaa317]

I think perhaps if the suggestions moderator had a ranking system, (s)he could use feedback received from the community to prioritize/identify the items and use a flagging system, similar to the flags in the create/join tournament area.

Perhaps something like:
Exclamation Mark = Hot one the community seems to like (i.e. should be higher priority)
Green Dot = Stuff lack is willing to admit is in progress or "approved" to be in a future release
Blue Dot = Some community support though not a lot
etc.

Or any other organizational method would work too. Just throwing it out there.

[agentcom]

In my opinion, there are two axes (as in plural of axis, not relatives of hatchets) that are important: Ease of implementation and Desirability of feature. Low/negative desirability, difficult fixes wouldn't be prioritized. Easy, desirable ones should. The other ones should be made as time permits and probably at the discretion of Lack/admins/mods/some combination. There are a couple of mods who have been talking about putting something like this together. We'll see how it goes.

As for a way of community rating of suggestions ... well I have a couple thoughts (1) the voices heard on the forum are a fairly good proxy for this; (2) up/down votes, unlike the current system don't allow things like "strong support" or "meh"; (3) systems that do allow for degrees of support/distaste get complicated. So, I'm not sure how much benefit there would be in a standardized system as opposed to people just reading the suggestion and feedback and getting a feel for how people view the suggestion.

[Woodruff]

In my opinion, there are two axes (as in plural of axis, not relatives of hatchets) that are important: Ease of implementation and Desirability of feature.

Indeed, this is exactly the case, in my opinion.

As for a way of community rating of suggestions ... well I have a couple thoughts (1) the voices heard on the forum are a fairly good proxy for this; (2) up/down votes, unlike the current system don't allow things like "strong support" or "meh"; (3) systems that do allow for degrees of support/distaste get complicated. So, I'm not sure how much benefit there would be in a standardized system as opposed to people just reading the suggestion and feedback and getting a feel for how people view the suggestion.

I think the community already ranks the suggestions to a degree. If I read through a suggestion, I definitely have a feel for what the community (that participates in this forum anyway) thinks about it.