Right-Click Select statuses are pointless
The current way categories on this site work cause most of the ideas to drown in the sea of ancient posts, which are often already in development or done.
The categories can be filtered, but the default view needs to make some sense, especially since the filters get reset after every page refresh.
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There should be only 2 statuses: Open and Archived. Anything that is Done, in Development or Invalid will become archived immediately.
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The default status filter should be Open, and should exclude all archived posts.
So that when the user opens this site, they see only relevant ideas which deserve votes. There's no point of voting for ideas which are already in development, done or invalid. And there's especially no point with greeting new site visitors by displaying these ideas.
What's most important is that the state where relevant ideas are displayed is the default one, which is currently not the case.
3 Comments
Hello - I'm recently returned, and one of the first things I did was to play with the drop downs to see what they did. My initial impression was, "Not much," so I agree work needs to be done. I would add the sorting drop down as well. What's the difference between "Hot" and "Top?" (I figured it out after some playing around). I appreciate brevity, but not at the expense of clarity.
you're making a pretty big assumption that people will even look at anything except for the first 10 posts on the main page. I don't have access to any analytics but I would bet money that most people glance at whatever is on the main page, and only actually click on anything that looks relevant to them from those first 10 posts. I would bet that most people just open RCS, and immediately click "Submit Idea" without even looking at any of the topics at all (or searching, as is evident by the numerous duplicates).
So yes, the statuses are pointless, but replacing them with other statuses is also pointless- nobody will look at them anyway.
While I do agree that there is a bulk of users that use the website hastily as you describe and for whom any change wouldn't have much of an impact, I think that we should just ignore that part of users and focus on those for which it would be important.
And in that regard, I think making a more strict default filtering where it focuses on showing topics that are actively relevant to act upon and leave the rest to more advanced search.
That being said, I don't think the states shoulds be removed, it is relevant info. They should be filtered. IMHO the "open" and "archived" states shouldn't compete with "done", "in development", "incomplete".
Much like on github and whatnot, tickets have "open/close" status that are different from the different status the tickets might be assigned to.