Should there be an internal review system for Suggestions?

[allmappedout]

Hey guys,

I know this has been suggested before, but for a while now, I've noticed this huge repeating cycle of ideas, whereby they get suggested, thread gets closed as either suggested before or on the WNTS list, and I think it's time to consider looking at having an upvote/downvote solution (similar to Tickld.com, for example), where good ideas make it through, and reposts,etc don't clog up the forum.

Ironically, this would probably get downvoted as a repost(!) but, if there's a way to fairly implement this, I'd really like to see it; obviously there's a risk of overly negative people downvoting everything, but hopefully this would be balanced by the overall community.

I'd suggest that 5 upvotes (perhaps utilising the 'rating' category for a thread) is enough to promote the post to the main suggestions forum?

It'd give me something to do at work anyway, as I'd be happy enough sifting through the ideas and helping promote the new/good ideas to the main forum, where they would hopefully stay a bit more permanently, which may mean that devs get a better chance to review them and provide community feedback.

[Beeman]

I'd be down for a community-guided development priority list. Kinda like the Planetside 2 roadmap. Or something like ideazhub for WarZ where players type in suggestions and then you can comment on them in addition to up/down voting things.

But I think the developers do pretty well on their own, to be honest.

[Diche Bach]

Yeah, it would seem that at present there is a real risk of Squad not being able to make much use of the suggestions section simply because it isn't organized. Some system for the community to reach a consensus about what 'we' as a community really want them to look at and think about does seem warranted. I don't exactly understand the specifics of the system you are suggesting, but I agree 100% with the spirit of it; so yeah, you got my upvote!

However, one other idea/suggestion: It might be a good idea to get a sense from Squad how much time / effort they would like to spend on browsing the forum suggestions, and/or other things like, how many total different suggestions they are willing to sift through. Also when they will do so: if they are only planning to glance at this stuff for 10 minutes in 1 or two months and only really look at it once, that is a very different 'target' for the community to aim for in terms of the content of the 'final' suggestion package, than if they express the intent to spend 30 minutes or an hour browsing an iterative list of suggestions every month until they are into beta development stage.

The general principle of not making them look at rehashes of the same ideas over and over and also the idea to not let good ideas get buried by the sheer volume is clearly of great merit, but I think a bit of liasing with Squad to know a bit more specifically what they would find most useful would make it even better.

[allmappedout]

I'd be down for a community-guided development priority list. Kinda like the Planetside 2 roadmap. Or something like ideazhub for WarZ where players type in suggestions and then you can comment on them in addition to up/down voting things.

But I think the developers do pretty well on their own, to be honest.

I agree, there's certainly no pressure being put on the devs to implement anything on the suggestions forum. It's simply there as a wishlist, and I'd certainly want to see it as no more than that. The overall game direction, and by corollary when things are implemented is still at Squad's discretion, as we can't see the bigger picture, but if they like an idea, and it may have been brought in soon, it could be that they can do some jiggling to get something in to a slightly earlier update.

I don't exactly understand the specifics of the system you are suggesting, but I agree 100% with the spirit of it; so yeah, you got my upvote!

Hurrah! To be honest, I hadn't fully thought it through either - I'm anticipating a sub forum with all the ideas being posted as normal, and the voting system within there, with the main forum having setup so that you can't post directly into it, but a mechanism is in place to automatically move good ideas once they meet the criteria from the sub forum to the main forum, and replies only are allowed on the suggestions forum. Presuming of course, that is possible..

However, one other idea/suggestion: It might be a good idea to get a sense from Squad how much time / effort they would like to spend on browsing the forum suggestions, and/or other things like, how many total different suggestions they are willing to sift through. Also when they will do so: if they are only planning to glance at this stuff for 10 minutes in 1 or two months and only really look at it once, that is a very different 'target' for the community to aim for in terms of the content of the 'final' suggestion package, than if they express the intent to spend 30 minutes or an hour browsing an iterative list of suggestions every month until they are into beta development stage.

The general principle of not making them look at rehashes of the same ideas over and over and also the idea to not let good ideas get buried by the sheer volume is clearly of great merit, but I think a bit of liasing with Squad to know a bit more specifically what they would find most useful would make it even better.

That again is a great idea, and certainly, if we can get buy in from the higher ups (I'm thinking the web devs for the forum parts and the mods and Gmods for maintaining/policing it), then we can look at reaching out to the devs and maybe saying "Okay, so we're going to set up maybe a monthly post in the suggestions forum that is a heat map of what the community feels would be nice-to-haves in an upcoming update, and it's an aggregation of the prior month's posts. It'd be great if we can feed this up to you, and, hopefully, get a little feedback back down the chain as a result".

Obviously, this is all hypothetical, and would be a fairly big change to how the forum deals with ideas. At the moment it's entirely democratic, and what I don't want is a small cadre of super users holding all the power over which ideas get green-lighted, so we would certainly need to look at the hard mechanics of the voting system to ensure egality and that it's fit for purpose.

Edited August 5, 2013 by allmappedout
missing word

[Mars90000000]

Hey guys,

I know this has been suggested before [...] repeating cycle of ideas

Oh the irony...

You can use the thread rating system which is already here. A good suggesting would get 5 stars. A bad one you give none. That way, you can judge from the topic and the rating if it's worth something or not. If not, then just don't reply to it, and it will eventually die off.

What could be implemented is sorting the threads based on the rating.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Mars90000000

[allmappedout]

Oh the irony...

You can use the thread rating system which is already here. A good suggesting would get 5 stars. A bad one you give none. That way, you can judge from the topic and the rating if it's worth something or not. If not, then just don't reply to it, and it will eventually die off.

What could be implemented is sorting the threads based on the rating.

Ironically, this would probably get downvoted as a repost(!)

I think you didn't finish reading my post, and this does also prove my point - the fact that I've had to raise it again because it hasn't been implemented because it's previously been moved off the pages shows how easily (what I think are!) good ideas can be lost.

The rating system doesn't work because good ideas can be agreed upon and then no further discussion is needed and thus they just move off the page. There's no way for good ideas to persist, which leads to ideas being raised again and again. The 'sort by rating' system could work but again it doesn't cut down the spam - you raise the same idea 30 times, and if it's a good idea you'll have 30 5* rating threads on it..

[Tex_NL]

I haven't read every word posted here but I totally agree something needs to be done about the constantly repeating suggestions.

One solution I personally suggested a few months ago should be relatively easy to implement: Don't sit back and rely on new people to search the forum to check if their idea is as new as they think. (Personally I didn't even know there was such a thing as the "What not to suggest" until at least a month after registering.) FORCE people to read the "What not to suggest" and "Known bugs" It just requires a custom plugin for the forum.

A vBulletin forum is capable of so much more than is currently used.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Tex_NL

[chaos_forge]

Or maybe apart from the "do not suggest" list, have an "already suggested" list as a repository for people to all go post on the same thread for a certain idea

[razark]

FORCE people to read the "What not to suggest" and "Known bugs"...

Or maybe apart from the "do not suggest" list, have an "already suggested" list as a repository for people to all go post on the same thread for a certain idea

See, y'all just don't understand. Yes, it might be similar to what's already been suggested. It might sound a lot like what's on the "do not suggest" list, but MY idea is so much better than everyone else's lame ideas, and there's no way anyone could ever have thought of it before, so I will just go ahead and post it anyway. The community will obviously see the great wisdom that only I can bring, and will shower me with praise.

And the cycle will continue...

[jwenting]

I can't but disagree. Any such "rating" system very quickly devolves into a popularity contest with people downvoting ideas not their own (or those of their close friends) simply to get their own to the top of the list.

If you want to create animosity between people, look no further.

1 month account suspension for making a "suggestion" on the do-not-suggest list is a far better idea.

[Fifi]

There should be a suggestion-tracking system, to make sure if any Squad member have read it and what's their opinion (no, considering, maybe, later, implementing, do not suggest even in the other form).

Refreshing the idea - the only way to actually make it noticeable - is a workaround.

It's not about upvoting/downvoting, there's not so many suggestion that Squad members couldn't read them and set their status - it's about avoiding good suggestions to got lost on n-th page because of the new ones.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Fifi

[allmappedout]

It's not about upvoting/downvoting, there's not so muany suggestion that Squad members couldn't read them and set their status - it's about avoiding good suggestions to got lost on n-th page because of the new ones.

Absolutely. The only way I know of where this works with any sense of consistency is, like I said in my previous post, tickld.com; I think the benefit there is that there are enough users that the critical mass of anonymity is maintained and so it won't end up devolving into cliques of people upvoting only a few ideas.

As I said, if we have a way of filtering ideas into manageable amounts, we can then feed this up to the devs in a monthly post, and we could reduce repetition, and get some feedback on feasibility, etc.

I think it'd also provide a really good way for people to be more involved. At the moment, I read the suggestion board more than any other board, so I'm really keen to see the board become more useful to both the community as a whole, and the development team.

[chaos_forge]

It's not about upvoting/downvoting, there's not so many suggestion that Squad members couldn't read them and set their status - it's about avoiding good suggestions to got lost on n-th page because of the new ones.

This. We had a 14-page discussion on barycenters not long ago, but once we figured everything out and stopped commenting, it got lost to the influx of new suggestions, so newcomers to the forums won't see it. I think stickying popular/often-suggested threads would be the best idea.

And YES. I hate not being able to tell if a dev has seen my idea or not.

[Dunbaratu]

This. We had a 14-page discussion on barycenters not long ago, but once we figured everything out and stopped commenting, it got lost to the influx of new suggestions, so newcomers to the forums won't see it. I think stickying popular/often-suggested threads would be the best idea.

But then that has the opposite problem. Old ideas end up crowding out new ideas. If each page of the thread topics list shows about 20 rows, then once there's been 20 good previous suggestions turned into sticky threads you'll never again see any new suggestion on the front page, and instead have to go to page 2 or 3 to get to the new stuff.

[Fifi]

If we run some suggestion system, the read by Devs will just go to the other category (and they'll probably be able to set them a priority) with notice about approvement, consideration or declining.

[allmappedout]

Indeed. I remember seeing that barycentre post, and was really impressed by how much work and thought went into it (I got lost when you guys were doing the error mappings!), but yes, like you said, that has now disappeared into the ether.

As I noted in the original post, it's not just a one-step process. Once an idea has been 'approved' as good enough to get promoted to the ideas forum, it gets debated as normal, and then gets included in a monthly communique post at a top level forum, so you would have "July ideas digest", which would contain a, say, 50 word outline of the idea, and the link to the post, for the top 10-15 ideas from that month. Once those ideas have been raised, they're effectively locked in and so the devs can approach them in their own time. Each month, any new ideas get added to a new post, and the cycle continues.

It's a more direct and intensive process to suggestions, but since suggestions are the place for the community to feed back their thoughts, it deserves a bit of love.

As the main ideas get debated, the hope is that we get a bit of dev two-way communication to say "oh! we hadn't thought of that, that's great!" or "Nah bro, ain't never gonna happen!". And that's fine; both responses may be expected, and like I said, we can't expect the devs to ever say yes to all the ideas we raise. There's limited resource, and scope, but certainly, by getting the community a little more focussed and organised on the submissions process (like a bug tracker), the devs can get a better handle on what the community is most keen on, and get a heat map of how we would like to see things progress.

[Nuke]

i see a lot of rehashing of old suggestions and it makes the suggestion board a rather tedious read. which leads to reposting, because noone wants to search or read more than the first page of links. its the web forum equivalent of kessler syndrome. the only way to deal with the garbage is by creating more garbage. i wouldnt mind a system of automatic thread merging that finds identical topics, and glues em together. but i guess a vote system will do.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Nuke

[allmappedout]

i see a lot of rehashing of old suggestions and it makes the suggestion board a rather tedious read. which leads to reposting, because noone wants to search or read more than the first page of links. its the web forum equivalent of kessler syndrome. the only way to deal with the garbage is by creating more garbage. i wouldnt mind a system of automatic thread merging that finds identical topics, and glues em together. but i guess a vote system will do.

Hah! Yeah, we'll sell this idea as the prevention of the uninhabitability of the forums! To be honest, I really don't mind about the specifics of how it's going to work, and certainly if we could have some sort of auto-merge, that'd be good, but I think that wouldn't stop reposts, but either way, I think it's something the forum really needs.

If any mods have had a chance to read this, I'd really love to hear whether any of this was possible...?

[ash73]

Couple of suggestions:

1. Split the suggestions page into sub-categories, e.g. physics, graphics & sound, controls, places to visit, rocket parts, spaceplane parts, career mode, resources

2. Add a button to sort suggestion threads by star rating (can only sort by views/replies right now)

3. Add an option in the advanced search function to filter suggestions by star rating and flags (below)

4. Store additional flags against each thread, e.g. new or duplicate, have the devs seen it, adopted it or rejected it

Out of curiosity, have many suggestions been adopted by the devs, or are we wasting our time...?

[chaos_forge]

As the main ideas get debated, the hope is that we get a bit of dev two-way communication to say "oh! we hadn't thought of that, that's great!" or "Nah bro, ain't never gonna happen!". And that's fine; both responses may be expected, and like I said, we can't expect the devs to ever say yes to all the ideas we raise. There's limited resource, and scope, but certainly, by getting the community a little more focussed and organised on the submissions process (like a bug tracker), the devs can get a better handle on what the community is most keen on, and get a heat map of how we would like to see things progress.

I would very much like to see this. +1 to you, sir.

[allmappedout]

Couple of suggestions:

1. Split the suggestions page into sub-categories, e.g. physics, graphics & sound, controls, places to visit, rocket parts, spaceplane parts, career mode, resources

Not a bad idea.

2. Add a button to sort suggestion threads by star rating (can only sort by views/replies right now)

I guess this could be useful, but would detract from the methodology of how we (I?) would want to approach this, but I guess would be handy round the rest of the forum..

3. Add an option in the advanced search function to filter suggestions by star rating and flags (below)

4. Store additional flags against each thread, e.g. new or duplicate, have the devs seen it, adopted it or rejected it

The problem with doing this is it doesn't reduce the amount of, for want of a better word, spam within the forums. There will still be as many posts, and who assigns the flag of new/dupe, dev interaction etc? The way that the forum currently works is that only the OP or mods can amend the original post, which is where the flag would be changed. This wouldn't work under a review system.

Out of curiosity, have many suggestions been adopted by the devs, or are we wasting our time...?

I don't have a number, and I couldn't really hazard a guess; almost everything that is now IN the game has been suggested at some point. Whether or not it's in the game through the community's input or not is complete speculation, although I'd hope to think that it was in part due to input from us. On the other hand, if you look at how the feedback C7 received recently on the SAS through both the testing group and the community at large, you can certainly see that changes can and are made within the game (thinking about it, I remember the RCS CoM bug being fixed at the community's behest as well as a few other things...)

EDIT: That was my Pi post...

Edited August 6, 2013 by allmappedout
mmm, 3.14...

[Capt'n Skunky]

What if someone makes a post listing all the suggestions made along with links to the threads it's discussed in. The list can then tag the suggestions as to their status, Never, Maybe, Next Version, etc. Then we can sticky said thread in the suggestions forum.

Now, this will NOT stop the repetitive suggestions, the only way to stop that would be to close the suggestions forum. You see, no matter what we do, we can't force people to read if they don't want to without some ridiculous scheme.

If someone is willing to step up to create and manage this post, I'll review it and see if it's worthy of being a Sticky. Remember, proper formatting, spelling and grammar, as well as the tone of the post will be considered. Once you have the post made and organized, send me a PM and I'll see what we can do.

Cheers!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[ash73]

One way to add some editorial value might be to have a trusted reviewer group* flag suggestions as "worth a look", in addition to the community rating stuff with star ratings.

*Obviously the group would need to be closely aligned with the devs' vision, which might be tricky, but it could add more value than just a popularity vote.

Re duplicates spam, if you could add another rating-like field to each each thread specifically to identify duplicates, everyone could flag them as soon as they spot them.

Then as long as people can sort suggestions by "new", "worth a look", "star rating", "not duplicate" it would be easier to find ideas worth commenting on.

[chaos_forge]

-snip-

Sounds like a good idea.

If nobody else gets to it first, I'll start making one tonight. Unless allmappedout wants to have the honors

EDIT:

On second thought, I might not be the best person. Once I head off to college in september, IDK how much free time I'll have

Edited August 7, 2013 by chaos_forge

[Fifi]

Me too. Studying IT is killing my free time.

Anyway, please, include my suggestions in the list (they are all small changes, but would help making the game perfect).

Here they comes:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44507-Allowing-axial-symmetry-in-VAB-and-vice-versa

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44931-Random-noise-on-nearby-terrain-instead-of-blurry-textures-HD-without-much-RAM

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44506-Making-the-procedural-terrain-generator-to-make-some-flat-areas-on-Duna-too

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44622-Ability-to-set-vessel-type-in-VAB-SPH

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44510-Stress-display-%28via-colouring-the-parts-in-flight%29

The first one optionally (better yes - it would greatly improve game engine) connects with that great suggestions (not mine):

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44813-Change-vehicle-Tree-structure-%28single-parent%29-to-adjacency-matrix-%28multi-parent%29

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44742-Rover-Assembly-Building-Rover-Symmetry

Thanks in advance - both to the person, who will make a list, and to Devs who will read them and consider if they are good enough (remember, I can always improve them and think about better solutions).

Edited August 7, 2013 by Fifi