Handling Suggestions and Feature Requests

So far I have not had a thread locked, but most of the other people seem to have. Hence my suggestion. It comes down to the idea that if they saw another section clearly labeled feature requests, it could more or less serve as a “thrash bin” to filter those out, while at the same time providing some value out of it (being able to see what popular requested features are and being able to sort them based on that popularity).

There is already rightclickselect.com for suggestions, we don’t need a section on this site. Further, expanding the scope of this site doesn’t come for free - to moderate/manage each section takes time from someone.

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Yes, unfortunately, there is only rightlickselect.

Why “unfortunately” ? What would be the advantage in having two sites for this?

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As I wrote above, RightClickSelect doesn’t have sorting of ideas by their votes, and when such feature was requested, the person behind the site said it’s not going to happen unless someone else does it.

The sorting orders in there are either “Hot” or “Recent”. “Recent” is chronological order, and “Hot” is some sort of average between chronological order and votes. The best ideas often end up being dug on one of the very last pages almost no one ever visits, and therefore lose their potential.

Advantage of having a proper site for community feedback, such as this: https://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/unity/suggestions?utf8=✓&status=0&category=&view=most_voted would be that at any given point in time, you can sort the ideas by their vote and quickly see what the community requests the most. And then next time something like Code Quest is done, you can quickly check, if some of the most voted and most popular ideas align with the project plans, and if possible, extend functionality of the planned features to cover also those popular requested features.

I also did not assume there would be 2 sites. I’d assume the official one would be endorsed, and rightclickselect would hopefully end up forgotten.

So I came here and signed up because I heard it was the place to give feedback from one of the Blender dev youtube channels and I thought great finally a more official place to post feedback/proposals because submitting something like that to the actual Blender issues site always felt wrong, and what I wanted to post was a mix of more general feedback (regarding shortcuts as a whole) and a detailed proposal on how the problems might be fixed. I didn’t though because then I saw all the threads being locked.

I saw people being redirected to rightclickselect which I didn’t even know existed. And at first I wanted to see what other things people had proposed, see if any developers were actually listening to anything, etc, but as @LudvikKoutny mentioned there isn’t even a proper sorting feature. Which how would developers even know then what features, etc, where the most wanted. And there’s no way for a detailed conversation from users to happen on top issues because you can’t even find them.

There really needs to be a place for this, like the issues, but just for feature proposals, plus you could cut down on repetitive feedback by encouraging people to search if the feature was already requested, already marked as wontfix or closed, etc, and you wouldn’t have people trying to post in the wrong places. Plus you could encourage experienced users to weed out the more sane proposals.

So I second making “feature proposals” section. Maybe even call it “feature proposals/general feedback” so all the feedback related to specific 2.8 things goes here and everything else there?

@alannorth - this is s topic which comes up from time to time.

I’m not against trying this, the issue is it depends on developers using it for it to be useful IMHO - see this reply: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/1211/55

If someone wants to setup an open-source user feedback site, they can try it.

I think there is an under estimation of how much work it is to properly manage - even if you only have to merge duplicate suggestions - this will be some effort after 6 months.
So I’m not really confident this would work for us at the moment. There was a long thread on this a while back:

So I read the thread, but is it still something that’s being worked on? That’s the thing about unofficial projects.

As for management, I’m sure there are plenty of people, me included, that would like to help Blender in some way but either don’t know how to code, or they’re web developers and would like to help, and then you could direct them to the site. It should be something 0 effort for Blender developers, official but community driven, and devs would only go if they want, but if they were looking for solutions to problems the community would know they would go there first, even add-on developers could go and if they already developed a solution, people could try it.

The other problem is there isn’t a real official discussion about what devs would want out of the site. I mean in the thread it was mentioned Phabricator wasn’t a good match (I’m not too familiar with how it works, but from looking at Blender’s issues site, it doesn’t have ratings and stuff like that?), but you could just setup a blank github repo just for feedback, for free, and that has ratings, tags, issue templates, sorting in any way you like, and you could set trusted community members as moderators, and it’s easy to add auto-closing of issues and bots. What’s that missing that devs would like?

But it wouldn’t make sense for someone to set that up or any site unless Blender asked officially for the community to be involved and help moderate it, and like how it was setup.

Also I still think it would be a good idea to have an official forum category here as a temporary fix because I see you can’t filter by open/locked threads and the forum looks like a mess now, but that’s just me.

Disagree that this needs to be official.

Blendernation, blenderartists, blender.stackexchange & blendswap aren’t official.
Nevertheless they’re popular and useful to the community.

If a site is run well and a useful for users and developers - it becomes a de facto standard.
Official or not.

Imagine rightclickselect was official, what would it change? all the pros and cons would be roughly the same.

Yes, but none of those are about handling feature requests, they don’t need to also be useful for blender developers, to have some interaction/communication with them, even if it is minimal. Those sites could come and go, but this is something that really shouldn’t. These are things that in most cases would go to an issue tracker, but I understand not wanting to pollute an issue tracker with feature requests, especially if it’s not suited to handling them.

I don’t mean it has to be officially managed by Blender directly. I just mean it has to be a space started/requested by Blender to work long term. It cannot be a one man project. It would change things because Blender devs could say, no this works, this isn’t working, etc, so that there is at least a chance of developers actually looking at it. There is a reason people ask for it to be official.

At the very least though, like I said, there needs to be some official list of things developers would want to see in a site like that. Do they just want feature requests, do they also want it to handle feedback? Would it be useful to split things into certain categories/tags, what would they be? Are there feature requests that are completely off the table? Would it help once a feature proposal was ironed out to then have a final clean proposal up? What else could we do to make the experience good for them?

The current system is obviously not working, at least in my opinion. Things are scattered and duplicated across multiple sites, stuff gets posted where it shouldn’t be, and good ideas get lost in this mess. The closest thing I’ve felt we’ve had in terms of communication and asking about potential features is the new Blender dev livestreams, but even those have become bogged down in duplicate questions, questions that make no sense, and is hardly suited to asking a proper question with a 200 char limit.

PS: I’m glad you’ve split this into it’s own thread.

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I am glad you’ve picked up after me so I don’t have to fight alone :slight_smile:

The main issue I see is that there is simply not a single place for Blender feature requests, be it official or unofficial, which is popular and at the same time allows to sort and view ideas in a manner which creates signal instead of noise.

Making it popular is simple - it would come from it being official, or at least semi-official, and endorsed by developers. You can see it worked in case of this forum. The very same day it was first endorsed it already gained a big traction.

But making it so that it allows reasonable sorting and the proposals based on the amount of votes is apparently way too much of a task for rightclickselect.

It would take a ridiculous amount to maintain such a platform. It would need to be strictly moderated to be useful. This would require a ridiculous time investment. And the value for the developers would likely be very little. Most features the developers are interested in are already understood by them. If they are looking for feedback, it is very simple to get it for them.
Have a look at the popular wireframe thread. How should anyone be able to moderate such a mess and convert it into something that is usable for developers? You can easily get the impression that all users agreed on that feature, but if you have a closer look, everyone had their own ideas which were not even compatible. Turning this into something useful would require a very experienced user who can always get in touch with developers to be sure the idea really makes sense in the technical context.

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Devs know what some or a group of people want, not the entire community.

People need official uservoice/request site tu be sure devs could see the requests.
And with a sorting, like for other software, devs will know exactly what blender users want.
Also, with one official place, devs would not be bothred anymore.

I don’t consider Righ click select as a request site since the guy in charge diminish every request he doesn’t like.
There is no sorting so, it’s pretty useless and it’s more a filter to not bothe devs than a request site IMO.

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I already posted a proposal to solve this, at least partially. I would simply not allow any discussion/comments under the ideas. Many feedback platforms have this option. Users would be able to only create ideas/requests, and others then could add one upvote, or one downvote. No discussion at all. Then:

If you like a proposed request, and think it would be a great sensible addition to Blender, you upvote it.

If you dislike proposed request, and think it’s a nonsense or it would clutter/overcomplicate Blender, you downvote it.

Every idea would start at 0, and upvote would add 1 to that value, downvote would subtract 1 from that value. Any idea which would have a negative number of votes would be automatically deleted after 30 days, unless it got back into positive numbers. But posters could still be encouraged to either re-phrase their feature request, or maybe come up with something better, so that it receives more popularity next time.

With these conditions, the site would pretty much manage itself. It would not need to be moderated, as there would be no space for any discussions. And it could not be polluted by spammy, low quality requests, because the community would filter them out using votes and then they’d get automatically deleted :slight_smile:

I do realize that time of people spent moderating the site is not only expense. Web hosting and maintenance costs a lot of money as well. That being said, if there was another fundraiser, similar to code quest, with a sole purpose of establishing and maintaining an official feature request channel, I would be more than happy to donate, even without any trinket in return :slight_smile:

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Why not collect a list of features missing from rightclickselect, then do a community fundraiser to hire a developer to add them?

The community managed to fund blenderartist discourse migration so it seems feasible.

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That would require some initiative from the people in charge of rightclickselect in the first place :slight_smile:

Cooperation, not initiative.

The project is free-software, they have already said they would accept contributions.

Alright, I’ve asked, let’s see how it goes…

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I tried to make something similar with a fundraiser to improve sculpt system. I’m waiting (I don’t remember how many months) the answer of the modeling maillist to know the basic information to make the fundraiser.

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The perfect example of what a great and official uservoice should be.

https://allegorithmic.uservoice.com/forums/261284-substance-painter

As you can see, there is a voting system and people can see if the devs are working on something.
image

Or declined, like that people can see it and stop bothering devs for the same feature.

On right click select it’s impossible to do that.

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