Suggestions for the Feature Suggestions Voting

Well, Linden Lab did it. With people like Azelda Garcia promoting this sort of idea for a long while, I guess sooner or later they would "feel the pressure" to do something similar. Philip said taht already one thousand residents voted on proposals - a huge amount, I'd say, for something "new" (if you compare to things like, say, the Mentor program, or any contests, etc.). As expected by a few of us, there seemed to be a huge demand of finally getting the features in a "single place" and make sure the Lindens are looking at it - while trying to avoid to post the same thing over and over again on the Features List/Hotline to Linden/other forums/external sites...

After just 2 days, my initial feedback is overall positive - better to have something to improve on, than nothing at all - but I already see two problems.

The first is actually already on the Feature Voting list! It's simple. People are not patient enough to scroll through all the features. So the oldest proposals that were submitted first will show up at the top, and get the most votes. Even if you scroll page by page towards the bottom of the list, after a while you find out you have already spent your 10 votes, and never reach the ones on the bottom. And then you have to go back to see where you have allocated your votes...

This means that if you were lucky to propose things just minutes after the site was launched, you're at the top of the list, and the "first page suggestions" will struggle for dominance, while the rest stays at the bottom, despite being more important/more interesting. Not nice.

A better approach would be to have the lists classified according to type. As a default (ie. when you switch to the page at the beginning), you'll see the proposals you've voted on (including your own...), and their ranking in the overall list. Then you have to go specifically to a category first - say "avatar/attachments" - and only there will you see the ranking among that category. If you have enough categories, there may be a chance that all the proposals fit on a single page. And finally, get a "order by newest/oldest" and "order by rank". That way, different people will see different proposals - according to their interests - and it wouldn't be so "obvious" to vote just on the oldest and top-ranking proposals.

Also, I think that a link to a discussion place (forum, wiki...) should be mandatory and unique. This is to avoid people just dropping 50 times the same proposal to spread votes, and thus promote other proposals instead (imagine you see 50 proposals with "I want a Linux client!" Which will you pick for your voting?). Of course, that won't stop people to post "fake" discussion threads but at least it will make it a bit more difficult. In one case, I tried to withdraw one of my own suggestions (which has been often discussed in the forums ) because I saw a similarly-worded proposal, but without a link for discussion. So I wasn't sure if I was talking about the same thing or not - I guess I was. Unfortunately, in the mean time, people have voted on my own proposal, and I couldn't "abandon" it any more Now we have two different proposals for basically the same thing, and votes are being spread among both, keeping both very low on the priority list

This is annoying and it should be addressed as well. I understand that re-editing the proposal should be made impossible, but at least it should be removable by the submitter, and all votes released (like what happens when a feature is approved by the Lindens).

A suggestion from Moon Adamant (who despises forums and would never post her ideas, although she discusses them freely in-world ):

Have "limited" features to be voted upon per week - say, just one browser page or so (you could fit perhaps 20 or so features, if the formatting was a bit different). All new proposals enter a queue, which is released 20 at a time. The voting goes after a week to an "archive" and is "closed" - but you can still view them!

Advantage:

- you see all features at a glance and minimize both the time in reading the proposals, as well as the problem of getting everybody just to vote on the top proposals
- people are encouraged to return to the voting site frequently, to make sure that they vote on proposals as they appear, instead of just voting once and never changing their votes, since that takes too much time and is too cumbersome under the current model
- LL gets an overview of the work they have to do every week and can plan better to tackle just a small amount of features every week

Disadvantage:

- important issues may get postponed for months (what is "important"? Hard to say, since it's so subjective...)
- people may resubmit the same proposal over and over again, thus "gaming" the system
- you lose a bit of the "overall picture"

Hi just seen the post in hotline, I would suggest that the creator of the proposition be allowed to notify a linden with a message attached ie, i want to abandon my proposition because i have replaced it for a better one here etc, or i have found a better duplicate here.

The other day we held a Voters Club meeting, which is an event I started to stimulate discussion of this new feature voting system. I've also provided a venue for people to display their propositions and displays free in world.

But we had a lot of basic questions about how the system works:

1) What does it mean when Lindens "acknowledge" a vote? Merely that they've recorded the fact of its existence? Why do some votes get this "acknowledgement" and others don't? Is that a polite put-down?

2) What is the process by which the Lindens examine these propositions and votes and then decide on them? Putting the pony in the welcome area was a quick sop to the "democracy" of "the masses," but what is their process for working on other more complex and mundane issues?

3) Why can't the names of the propositions be sorted alphabetically, and why can't they be put in topical groups to be found more easily -- there are over 300 now apparently.

4) Why can't we vote no? Being able to vote only "yes" feels like the Soviet Union.

5) Could we have a URL that leads exactly to a proposition so that people can advertise them more readily?

Letting the entire forum population arbitrarily add what are supposed to be formal feature proposals seems to be rather disastrous.

Maybe LL should just take ideas from the suggestion forum and write the props themselves. That will avoid incomplete and overlapping material, help insure that we don't waste any votes and defeat the popularity aspect as everything will be finally propped by a Linden.

heh. on that note, Khamon:

Vote for proposition 396!