I am not sure how this would help the developers to get an idea what kind of features the users want. With your oversimplified solution, you end up with a social media kind of thing. Some people are going to vote it up because they like the overall idea and don’t care about the details. Others may also like the overall idea, but think it should be solved differently or they see that this approach makes no sense and they are going to downvote it. Without the ability to discuss, you don’t understand what the votes actually mean.
If you take the case of the colored wireframe discussion in the BlenderArtists forum, it would be a total mess in your system as well. You may get several suggestions, but you don’t know what the voters actually prefer. There might be a top notch suggestion which gets downvoted because it would just be another similar suggestion and people haven’t thought it through. Like this, it could be that the suggestion from a popular user gets voted up or just the oldest one, even though it is not the best available one. This would dramatically decrease the value.
With this uservoice
It’s possible to comment, to vote, to see the status from devs etc.
It’s IMO the best solution but that should be used by devs too.
Planned, Declinned, commented etc.
Some people could make some moderation but not on guy alone like on RCS.
RSC is not fit for that if you look at it.
I agree that just letting users post requests with voting and without comments is not going to work well. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I think an ideal system that would require the least amount of moderation would be something like the following:
- The site would list proposal “topics”, not the proposals directly.
- Users would check their problem/proposal doesn’t already have a topic posted. If it doesn’t they would then request a proposal topic be opened, a mod would have to approve, otherwise they could append their proposal to an existing topic.
- A topic would consist of the problems the proposals are trying to solve, potential solutions and a discussion section. The Problems list I think would be useful for devs in that even if they don’t like the solutions, they know what people are having problems with. Having the actual proposals separated from the discussion makes it easier to digest and browse for everyone.
I’ve made a really quick mockup to help illustrate what I mean. Here’s my uh proposal site proposal…
That’s just me though. I’d like to hear why devs would like to see in the site.
Improvements to a website and the sculpt system are quite unrelated.
It may seem so, but the message wasn’t just about the web, it was before we divided the topic, but about how to make a fundraiser.
It seems to me that these are similar issues. In the fact that to be able to make a serious crowfunding one needs some information to be able to estimate the costs and maybe even to be able to make them cheaper. In addition, some involvement of the developers, or at least the owners of the modules, is needed to know if the commit will be reviewed and will not be in a limbo. If an attempt to start a crowfunding is met with silence on the part of the developers, one desists. I still want to do a crowfunding for the sculpting on blender and improve the parts I saw that were looser. Basically
- layer system
- some improvements in workflow ( dealing with masks essentially)
- integrate instant meshes, even if in the form of addons.
This would completely change the utility of blender in sculpting in a project. But as I say, I don’t completely know the costs of such a thing, times and needs.
Whatever the case is with your proposal - there have been enough successful crowd funding in the Blender community to prove the community is capable of doing it - if there is enough interest.
Just a PSA for everyone. Rightclickselect.com now has the ability to sort by “Rating”, which makes it hugely useful now for ideas and proposals.
Furthering this, there is an active community on the Dev Wiki for bug reports. A lot of good people triaging the bug requests. We don’t need one person or a small group of mods. The community should be able to handle it pretty well with up votes and down votes, but it has to be utilized. A lot of good ideas on right click select right now, but haven’t seen much dev participation. I know, they’re incredibly busy, maybe Ton and Brecht are pulling ideas from there behind the scenes, but case in point:
I proposed a pretty simple sculpting feature (an undo sculpt or erase sculpt brush to erase multi resolution sculpting translations back to original) and it got upvoted, and a lot of encouragement, but never heard anything a year later.
I’ve started triaging stuff that comes into bug reports, and it’s really a great system. The devs know that once it’s been triaged, it is important or not, verified, or not.
Now feature requests are a little more subjective, but that’s where the rating system comes in.