Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion

Is this section of the book page a bit redundant?

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When it’s empty or just started it feels redundant, but when it has data makes a bit more sense.

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Yes agreed, although still not very happy with the design. It was a Brandon original design, which often leaves much to be desired…

I mean, it’s still redundant. It’s literally duplicated from the other section. For a stats section, the start/end dates provide no additional value, and the page count is shown a third time below anyway. @brandon Why not remove the completely duplicated status and just show the stuff below it?

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Small bug: The page title doesn’t update when changing filters on the search page, so if you go by direct link from the menu to something like Browse > Light novels, it always says “Japanese Light Novel Difficulty List” in the browser tab title even when different content is now being displayed.

Also, why does this show two filters that are coupled together?

ANNOUNCEMENT: New ‘Product Requests’ category.

As we’ve been getting so many product requests and updates in this thread, we’ve (@Megumin and myself) decided to add a new subcategory to ‘Natively’ for these requests.

Please see a full description of the category here.

You will notice that there are many things are already added and that’s entirely due to @Megumin, so big shoutout to him! He’s uploaded all the topics in that category and added the Trello tasks too. Last week he privately messaged me and proposed a plan on how this could work. You’ll notice that the new category allows voting for your favorite features and a link to a public Trello board.

Since @Megumin has demonstrated large initiative here and has been a very positive contributor so far in the community, he will be help organizing and moderating both the ‘Product Requests’ category and the Trello board.

For more information, please read more here.

This will be an ongoing experiment as we figure out how all this will work, so any thoughts don’t hesitate to let us know.

And as far as more Moderator responsibilities, if you are interested let me know. When I plan to add formal moderators that govern the entire forum, I will of course do an open request for moderators. I named @Megumin here for this subcategory because this was almost entirely his project and initiative.

Hope you enjoy!

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I’ve never been an admin of a Discourse forum, but I know that you can grant custom titles to users as well.
That sounds like a good time to do so.

I just voted on something for the first time and it said that I had a certain amount of votes available–is that in general for my time on the forums or per day?

It’s a total. You get a vote backs if you cancel your vote or if the feature gets completed.

I think that’s not gonna be helpful in the longrun tbh. There are already 27 suggestions in there but to only be able to vote on 5 in general until a feature that you vote on gets completed or deleted from that category doesn’t really make sense? Especially since @brandon already said that the amount of votes won’t truly determine if a feature is added. It would be nice if we could vote on however many that we want because, otherwise, there’s no true way to gauge interest because people have to limit their votes.

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Well, the point is that because you have a limit, you need to pick the ones you care about the most. I already shifted my votes around a bit.
What can be an issue, though, is that votes call more votes and new suggestions have a hard time getting off the ground.

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That’s because of the limit :woman_shrugging:. Some of them are interconnected and don’t truly need to be separate topics, which is what makes the limited amount of votes seem counterintuitive. @Megumin

For example: Improved book series page and Book Descriptions could go together because they could be on the same page because allowing a book/series description on the book series page is still an improvement of that page. Having to vote for both is redundant, so when you’re “focusing” on which of your votes really matter, you’re leaving off something that actually could be attached to another thing.

Another example: Search Update Improvements, Community Search, and Furigana Search and probably anything else with search involved are really all one issue because that’s all something that’s going to be within the same exact area. Furigana and Search Updates are about being able to include/exclude or filter (so the Boolean search method)–they dont need 2 separate topics to vote on. Community search can also be tagged onto that because you’d be able to change a filter to say that you’re searching for a user and not a book.

Yes, we can play around with vote limits a little, but there does have to be some sort of limit as @Naphthalene says. @Megumin and I can perhaps look into what other places do - we aren’t breaking new ground here :slight_smile:

I think some sort of tactical voting is alright too.

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And as for how the tickets are broken up, well it’s never going to be perfect. I don’t want everything bundled into one. Would much prefer them to be separate and more inline with how they would be developed.

You just will have to choose your favorite in some cases! Tough choices I know :slight_smile:

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I understand that, but for the ones I pointed out, I dont really see the benefit in those being separated? Why would you be against one aspect of a search feature being updated? It kinda makes no sense to be heavily against one type of search feature being added. If you’re not in need of that search feature update, then you just wouldn’t use it :sweat_smile: I don’t use the award winner filter or the wanikani filter because those mean nothing to me, but I’m not against them being there because they’re still a part of the search function and they’re benefiting somebody. If all of those are within the same thing, you’d still be voting on the majority/the part that you agree with. If I agree with community search, even if I don’t care about furigana, I’d still vote on it.

Well… yes. But as @brandon said some tactical voting is fine and anyway things will eventually get implemented, thus freeing all those votes for something else. It’s only an issue if a suggestion just gets buried so far back that it’s impossible for people to notice it (thus leaving it at 0 votes), but considering suggestions seem to go through an approval selection (?), I guess that won’t be the case.

There’s an opportunity cost in developing anything, even trivial. If no one cares about a feature, any time spent on it (and any visual space taken by it) is a waste. It will also need maintenance in the future… so no, bundling a bunch of features together does not feel like a good idea.

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That only works if you implement the features at a reasonably quick pace, which you already indicated may not happen. People won’t want to “waste” votes on big items that you won’t get to for a long time. Personally I think no limit or a high limit makes the most sense, unless you’re committing to working on most of the top items. (If you have a way of marking a suggestion as “not doing” to also refund the votes it might work as well.)

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I guess closing the thread has that effect (but it might be a bit brutal :sweat_smile:)

While I understand this, the ones that I’ve brought up were specifically chosen because they are ones that have been mentioned multiple times, so I do know that people care about them. A good amount of people do care about furigana search and community search and whatever the other one was. I’m just confused about the need to bundle up those specific suggestions. I’m not talking about everything in general. But a search update, even if the updates were implemented one by one, is still just a search update at the end of the day. Whether it’s broken into 3 smaller updates, it’s the same thing lol. Why would I waste 3 votes other than to say “hey, I really care about you updating the search!!” if only one was needed. If @brandon did decide to actually implement the search updates (and not necessarily in one big go), he could easily say that he’d be breaking it up or that there’d be a particular order when he states that he’s agreeing to update those things.

The search feature is a pretty big thing that’s needed in order to fix the UI on the website. Because so many features are missing, more users are unlikely to use it or to join because they aren’t able to use features that are available on a majority of other websites that have a similar setup.

:joy: :joy: Oooh, now that I did not know. Closing it would make all votes revert? Or would voters from that thread get a notification that the topic was closed, so they can take their vote back?

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That’s how it’s intended to work. Closing the thread and leaving it there, so people know it was suggested before. But the system will still refund the votes.

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