- 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.