Reviewing Issue Ranking [Still Beta]

[Renegade]

I was just fixing a few minor issues with the Issue Ranking system (it actually checks whether a stance is being submitted now, and it pre-selects the saved stance if one has already submitted a stance for an issue), and I figured, since it's been in use for over a month now, it may be time for a little feedback/review session.

I realize that, with DFD running, the positioning/use of IR is a little unclear, so let me try to clarify that up front:

• DFD won't run forever. Once DFD has cut down the number of open issues to a manageable level, we will rely on IR and issue comments to vet the support newly-submitted issues have again. In other words, DFD is a short-term solution, whereas IR is a long-term solution.
  
• DFD only preselects a set of issues which will be worked on in the future - it doesn't prioritize them. In other words, when DFD is over, we'll still have to decide in which order to tackle the two dozen issues-to-implement, and the support indicated through IR will be elementary in that.
  

With that out of the way, what do you think of Issue Ranking so far? What could be changed? What are you missing?

[Modder666]

I think Issue Ranking itself was a great idea. I know that there are different levels of support for certain issues, and there is no weight towards issues with 20 supporters and issues with 2 supporters. I'm not sure of the best way to improve the IR system based on my observation however.

[DCoder]

Issue Ranking rocks.

[Orac]

You could make a killing on spare kidneys...


I would suggest giving users a finite number of votes to use, so that each user can only vote of a dozen issues or so. This would hopefully mean that rather than everyone voting for everything, people would vote only for things they actually cared one way or another.
But that's all just an opinion.

[Renegade]

That's an interesting idea!

[Blade]

Reminds me of the old Rockpatch feature support "system" that was going on modenc for a while.

[Renegade]

true! I forgot about that
I guess good ideas always return. ^^

[reaperrr]

Issue Ranking rocks.

Absolutely.

As for suggestions, maybe introduce some filters, something like "Show all", "Show only open issues" and "Show only suspended issues". Right now, duplicates and suspended features are shown, so the list is a bit longer than necessary.
And due to DFD, the number of issues that get suspended even though they have some positive votes already is bound to increase.

[Renegade]

That duplicates are shown is intentional...suspended features...maybe. It makes sense, so I guess I might have done that on purpose, back when I coded it.

The reason duplicates are shown is that not necessarily everyone has noticed & supported the original issue or vice versa.
e.g. you could have one issue "Make Tanya show us her TITS" and one issue "Increase number of nude women in the game", with 23 supporters on the first, and only 5 on the second - it would be bad form to "hide" the wide support of the concept, just because the issue that got lucky was a dupe.

Suspension has a similar argumentation: Suspended issues aren't dead. Just suspended. So especially for those issues, it's important to see how big the support behind them is, to know when to unsuspend them.

But yeah, filters might be an option.

[Orac]

Well, if I was going to vote within a specific category of feature, I'd probably go for the suspended ones. As you pointed out, they aren't dead, so voting for them is probably more useful than showing yet further support for a feature which is already being worked on.
But that is just my opinion