A new way to prioritize community suggestions? Meet UserReport.

[Rahlzel]

With the increase in popularity of Colonial Marines, I've been looking for a way to make it easier for the community to show fixes and changes that are the most important to you. Enter UserReport.

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7mPCi9IwiQ[/video]

Implementation:

• Bug reporting is available via UserReport, but I don't like it as much as Github, and our forum is a distant 2nd, so this would ONLY be for suggestions/ideas.
• The button on the side of the website is optional. We can very simply link to our personal UserReport like this.
• Splitting the Bugs & Suggestions forum into two forums and making the Suggestions forum the aforementioned link would be step 1. Step 2 would be either us or our users placing the ideas that are already here on the forum onto UserReport.

Pros:

• Account creation is NOT required. Anonymous suggestions/ideas are allowed, so there's nothing stopping anyone from submitting ideas immediately.
• Spam can be removed via the UserReport Dashboard that I and/or other staff will have access to.
• Email notifications happen when users post a comment on your idea (assuming you write your email address when posting an idea). Unlimited staff emails can be added to the admin dashboard so that they know when a new idea arrives.
• Ideas can be voted on, allowing developers and the community to see the best ideas. They can also be sorted by # of votes.
• Developers are more easily able to prioritize work based on which ideas are the most popular.
• Similar ideas can be merged into one idea, which also sums up all the votes of both ideas.

Cons:

• Spam is a slight concern, but not major in my mind. It can be taken care of quite quickly.
• Votes can be compounded by the same person simply by using a different browser. Again, very minor, but noteworthy. Nothing can be downvoted, so there won't be a vote war of any kind, but it might decrease the accuracy of voted ideas.
• Less control over the content of the ideas. No markup, BBcode, or HTML will work. Just plain text. Even links aren't clickable. However, it's a fairly new project and support for this could very well be on the way.

What do you think? Why not vote on it as a new suggestion?

Click here to vote for this suggestion

[apophis775]

I'd rather not.

It's hard enough to get people to put suggestions here.

[Rahlzel]

It's hard enough to get people to put suggestions here.

I'd understand if you said something like, "The inability to use markup is too detrimental to the potential of an excellent suggestion".

But... because it's too hard?

Our forum requires registration. This includes email confirmation and CAPTCHA. UserReport doesn't need any of that.

So, objectively, UserReport would make it far easier to get people to give us their suggestions.

[mdom]

Yeah but you have to leave the forums to suggest. I would rather have everything on one site.

[Rahlzel]

Yeah but you have to leave the forums to suggest. I would rather have everything on one site.

A fair point, and one I can agree with as being a "con".

[SecretStamos (Joshuu)]

[UnknownMurder]

I'm giving you a +1 Reputation for this.

[Rahlzel]

I'm not seeing the support needed for this to be a thing, so I'll put it on the backburner in case we want to pursue it in the future.

Thanks to those of you who submitted feedback.