Prevent Unseen Proposals in Here From Being Buried Forever
Right-Click Select may be functioning less like an Amazon of ideas and more like an eBay of ideas. Unless the proposal gets the correct people to see it at the correct time of day and day of week, nobody will see it. New posts will bury it. There is no mechanism to let it be ever seen again other than wading through hundreds of posts (both newer posts and old posts with just a few interactions). The idea will get buried no matter how useful it is or how many people would want it, largely based on timing and wording (much like eBay). Consider adding a feature that somehow lists "unseen ideas", where noone other than the author has commented or otherwise marked the proposal yet (maybe if it has fewer than 3 non-author comments--maybe prioritize ones with no upvotes nor downvotes). Tooltip: "The Blender community has not determined the value of these proposals yet. Help by opening them and commenting, upvoting, or downvoting."
6 Comments
It would also be more helpful if people proposing ideas actually used the tags to correctly categorize their proposals so people could find them.
I try to get to all of them (for instance, I re-tagged this proposal to Meta), but I'm sure some fall through the cracks.
That said, it would be nice to have some sorting options.
* @Jason van Gumster * I think it would be good to sort proposals by their scope, too. For example, many of my proposals on this site are small in scope -add a Python operator, or extend an existing feature. Most of the popular proposals are large in scope-- create a new feature, sometimes one that hasn't even been designed yet. A small proposal is a lot easier to do than a big proposal! So I think it would be good especially for new developers to sort proposals this way. We need big and small features to make Blender better.
And of course I know this is a subjective measurement, a guess at best for people that don't know the code well. Even people that know the code might think "this is easy," then try to add the feature and realize it isn't. Maybe this kind of thing would require a person to judge and moderate, maybe it could be left to individual users.
* @Josephbburg * Yeah... that'd be great to have. But I'm not really sure we have a good system for evaluating the scope of a proposal.
Perhaps the default view can show posts where the (date updated) > (Last time you logged in) - assuming this data exists!
Lack of comments or interaction might be a consequence of a low quality post. Perhaps the number of views that a post has had would be a more relevant metric, with a system preventing posts with < 'threshold' views from being buried somehow.
* @tomasz.brain * You could say the same about eBay items--that is the problem, and the proposition that relevance is the main factor is incorrect. Exposure trumps quality--it's basic marketing. Once the number of choices reaches critical mass, only choices that are at the right place at the right time will get anywhere. The same exact eBay item can go for a lower price or unsold if you don't post it at exactly 7pm US Eastern Time Sunday (also gets people in California that way who are three hours behind) according to past statistics. Yes, wording is huge as well, but not everyone is a native English speaker--even if they are, they may not have experience marketing some technical idea with a terse catchy title--are their ideas less worthy of exposure if the titles aren't catchy enough, or don't have enough capital letters? So do the same time-based statistics here and see if we don't find the same type of pattern (time- and/or day-dependence, number of capital letters, quantity not appropriateness of meaningful keywords in title). If not, that would be a surprise.