Fwd: Collecting feature requests

Kevin Stange kstange at pidgin.im
Sat Jan 3 18:31:35 EST 2009


Casey Ho wrote:
 > You seem to have missed the point of Brainstorm.
> 
> The point was _NOT_ to improve our development tools.
> 
> The point was to improve our user relations.

I think I speak for nearly all of the development team when I say that
we do not feel it improves user relations to give people an extra place
where we will blatantly declare we intend to disregard all of their
feedback.

> There was no intent that developers would ever need to even look at
> such a site.  By corollary, I never expected it to be a huge driver of
> development either- mainly because some of the ideas are already being
> worked on (good!).

So in other words, your goal was to create a black hole in which lots of
information goes in and almost always disappears forever.

> 
> Yes things will be redundant.  But it's a place for users to vent, for
> users to find out that other users care too and for an idea to be
> picked up by a new patch writer or plugin developer.  The latter point
> is the most important, because right now everything that happens in
> Pidgin needs to be filtered by the developers first- ala the
> Cathedral.

Everything that happens in Pidgin will always need to be filtered
through the developers first before anything changes.  We are in charge
of the project.  This just misleads users as to what level of impact
they have on things.

If people don't want us "in the way" of their hopes and dreams,
separating the good and viable from the bad and insane, they need to
create a fork.  We try to understand the concerns of potential plugin
and patch writers and make libpurple and Pidgin adaptable to their needs
and goals, but if they're talking in one place and we're talking in
another, we won't hear each other.

We already categorize tickets on our ticket system to separate feature
requests for which we want third party contributions or plugin authors
to step up, and you can drop a single search query into the ticket
system to find them.  If we want to pre-fabricate a page that shows
those tickets, that's pretty easy, but segregating our users into a
separate-and-not-even-supposedly-equal "feedback" mechanism is just
going to result in worse user to developer communication.

This entire plan seems to be structured around the idea we do not want
or care to hear from users, which is untrue and helps feed a lot of
misconceptions about our project.

Kevin

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