Should we move everything from uservoice.beeminder.com to here? I think this is better in most ways – especially in that it gets everything in one place – but Discourse doesn’t have voting like Uservoice does.
How useful is voting, anyway? Do you just work on the top voted feature? Because if not then you should still get an idea of how popular the features are by how much activity there is on them here.
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Discourse keeps track of status, which is similar enough to voting. I think more people will participate if you move things here, especially with the single login.
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Uservoice has always felt uncomfortable to me (“will anyone ever see this?”), happy to see that sort of discussion merged over here.
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User voice feels a bit like a place that feedback goes to die. I’m not sure that here would be better though? I guess other people are more likely to see it and comment on it but it’s not clear whether that will translate into you being more likely to act on it.
(I’m not sure what would though, or even whether that’s a desirable thing)
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I totally know what you mean. I should defend it a little bit, just to point out that Uservoice hides all the stuff marked completed so the stuff remaining makes it look like we’re neglecting suggestions. In fact we’re only neglecting some suggestions. :)
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I mean I think ignoring some/most suggestions is a totally legit thing to do. Most suggestions are bad and you have finite amounts of time. It just feels hard to know if it’s even worth making them.
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We’re definitely grateful for them, and I feel like they’re worth it just for the discussions they generate. So this sounds like a further argument to fold Uservoice into this Discourse forum.
I suspect only a bug-tracking-ish tool (perhaps one or more of the Trello boards?) would fix the effect of not knowing whether someone is working (or planning to work eventually) on the suggestions that are submitted.
That’s also the thing that always bugged me about UserVoice: most of the suggestions tend to linger in what could be called “unconfirmed” status in full-featured bug trackers. In contrast, it’s very encouraging (for a person considering to submit some feedback) when tags like “assigned”, “wontfix”, “fixed”, etc, are provided.
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Still thinking about this but made a category here in the forum in case people like it: Bugabee
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I think moving things from Uservoice to here would encourage more participation. I’ve never really paid any attention to the fact that beeminder had a Uservoice, let alone make use of it, whereas I actually do read and contribute to threads here.
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The Bugabee category is going strong except people aren’t using the hearts much so I’m not sure if that’s a good substitute for voting like on uservoice.beeminder.com.
But I think we’re convinced to migrate from Uservoice, just not sure how highly to prioritize it…
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FWIW, I can’t see any hearts.
I see them at the bottom of each post. There is a row of 4 icons just to the left of the reply button. The left-most one is a heart (except for your own posts or comments). They are really dim if your mouse isn’t over that particular comment.
But there isn’t much to indicate that it’s really to be used as a voting mechanism for showing interest in a particular bug.
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Thanks @martyh. And @tjb, do you see them now or is it possible they’re only visible to users who hit some karma threshold?
From left to right, I see:
- a period (".") over red background, mouseover-text “like this post”
- a chain icon over gray background, mouseover-text “share a link to this post”
- a period (".") over gray background, mouseover-text “privately flag with post …”
- three centered periods ("…") over gray background, mouseover “show more”,
- arrow and reply button, blue background.
Probably you’re talking about the leftmost period. Various social media sites have trained me to ignore such fluff.
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Using Firefox (windows PC) I see only icons:
- Heart, same mouseover text
- Chain, same mouseover text
- Flag, same mouseover text
- Bookmark (looks like an award ribbon), mouseover text “You’ve read this post; click to bookmark it”
- Arrow and reply button (blue, no background), mouseover text “Begin composing…”
Hope this helps.
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FWIW, I don’t think we should shoehorn Discourse into tasks it wasn’t meant to fill. The poor default visibility of the hearts, the clear chronological focus whereas most recent = most visible, and the inability to sort by hearts (the “top” option sorts by recent activity) makes it clear that it’s definitely not attempting to cater to bug tracking uses.
On the other hand, I don’t really like UserVoice’s implementation of the feedback mechanism. It obscures the official team’s activity too much, makes it hard to understand the chronological progress of particular reports, duplicates are very easy to make, etc. Of course ideally a proper bug tracker would provide all this functionality, but yet another online platform would probably not be ideal for the community.
I would therefore suggest a middle-ground: github issues. Although it only has two natively supported states for bugs (open/closed), the issues feature is quite convenient even for an empty repo, allowing easy subscription w/ email & onsite notifications, @ mentions, autolinks to/from code, markdown formatting, editing of comments, task lists with checkmarks, milestones, custom labels, etc. Since you already have an organization there, why not make use of it?
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I liked the voting in Uservoice. Felt like it gave some weighting to the issues.
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