Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion

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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But you wouldn’t :sweat_smile: You would just vote for the ones you care about. Since you said you didn’t care about one of those, you would not vote on it, right?
You can also be tactical, as mentioned, and only vote on the most popular, hoping it also brings your stuff or at least that people will vote for it next.

I’m not sure, actually. I googled it and got

  • If the topic is closed or archived, the votes are released to the users and can be applied to other topics but the vote count on the topic remains.

So, yes, it seems like it should be fine!

I’m speaking in hypothetical about me not caring about a particular aspect of search being updated. But if someone does think that all of those are important because they are all within the same category/the same thing, you shouldn’t have to waste 3 votes on it unless you’re making a point.

And, I think either you or somebody else pointed out that some people probably aren’t going to use their votes on things that seem to already have a large amount of votes–which leads back to wasted votes. Or is it against the rules to just add the suggestions of those missing things to the topics that I’m voting on since I see them to be the same feature being updated? Because then I could go vote on community search and then say “i’d like to add furigana search and the other boolean search option of “match exact”” :thinking: :face_with_monocle:

I honestly don’t see what the problem is with using 3 votes on 3 things :frowning:

I was saying the opposite :sweat_smile:

No, that absolutely sounds like something you could do, but then you’ll probably still get the same answer that it’s too much features in one bundle.

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Ok everyone, after discussion with @Megumin I think we’ll move away from using ‘votes’ and just switch to ‘likes’. Is that ok?

@Naphthalene I agree that the voting system would work, but @seanblue & @onigiristudies are right that the backlog will become a bit overwhelming and we’re trying to use the category to showcase popularity… which I think tactical voting doesn’t really showcase.

If we were going to be implementing them all very quickly and keeping a small backlog, I think voting would be the way to go.

Ok?

Edit: We cannot use likes apparently as you can only sort by total likes in a thread, not votes. Accordingly i’ve upped the vote count.

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Even if you move to unlimited voting, I’d still retain the voting system over the likes, as it allows you to sort by votes in the forum subcategory, and also allows you to keep track in another place of what you have voted.

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Ugh, it looks like we can’t really do by likes either as it counts all likes in a thread, not just the topic post likes.

Yes I guess we should just extend the voting system. I’ve upped the number of votes for each user type. Should be more than enough for now.

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