There’s one thing I never know what to do about. There are a lot of posts where people are like “why doesn’t MDG look at/respond to my thing”. In some cases, it’s that we didn’t have the time, and that’s unfortunate.
But there are also cases where we looked at it and didn’t like it at all, and it would just take a long time to start a discussion about the pros and cons of that particular idea. In that case I often think that it is more valuable for me to do something else, but it still looks bad to not reply to these. What to do?
Something like Rejected board in Trello would probably improve current state.
With some short explanation why not, if some1 already made effort to look into it.
Or what were the decision factors why not look into it at all.
I understand we all get busy, but the same time in my business i need to make time to acknowledge that i have read and will reply to customers even if its a brief message.
In that case I often think that it is more valuable for me to do something else
maybe i am reading that wrong but to me that seems harsh, if my customers saw me say that on our support portal i would loose them
Not every post on forums deserves time to write a thoughtful and clear response (my opinion). And there are multiple scenarios when it makes sense to “wait out” to collect more information from multiple sources and only then reply with a prospective gathered.
Personally I can see how something is a good post, I just “like” it to express my support of “an post worth reading”, like it makes good points, or gives a new view.
For posts that repeat the same thing that was said 200x times in the thread, it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge it individually.
If a post is a huge wall of unfiltered thoughts text with ridiculous speculation, bad formatting CAPS LOCK and bold words without a need, then I just skip the whole post all together - communication requires effort on both sides of the line.
The Blaze thread responses from Evan for the technical aspect. Also Evan and Geoff asked for the specific information “what do you like in Blaze? What don’t you like in React? What do you think about JSX?”. After collecting responses, talking to productions users 1:1 and discussing it internally, Geoff released a response: Angular, React, and Blaze
I think it is good to make sure everyone is heard and considered. But what annoys me is a group of the same people making the same point in every single thread with provoking titles 20 times a day.
I think we both mean this in a good way, but if the point you’re making here is that that thread was a good example of how communications should go and that it was handled great, than we think differently
A simple “We don’t know” or “Give us some time to figure this out” or “We are thinking in this direction but aren’t sure yet” is fine by me. That would have prevented a lot of miscommunication I think.
You shouldn’t be responsible for handling all the requests. Imagine if a government did the same thing and had to hear everyone! It seems the real problem is getting the things that matter to surface, which begs the question, what are the things that matter? Crowdsourcing it I think is the way to go.
A voting system would really help. For example, there are people on this forum that care and voice their questions and concerns about:
Blaze (50?)
Testing (20?)
Offensive language used in APIs (1?)
I think empowering the community members to propose an idea for other members to vote on would allow you to answer things that have a critical mass. And here I mean answer, not deal with. I think the MDG should listen to the community, and I that’s been going quite well recently through deliberate and positive action, so kudos all around.
A voting system such as UserVoice also allows things to get a little more constructive as a proposal or question, which is better than an angry “who moved my cheese” post!
In my view, it would be great to weave something like that into this forum.
Maybe some kind of survey? On some kind of time-sensitive basis? (Weekly, Monthly, etc)
I think you hit the nail on the head with your heart sorting analogy. In an open forum like this, it’s obviously hard to quantify things, especially when so many posts/threads overlap with each other.
I’m guessing that if you gave readers a list of possible priorities, we could sort them based on our experiences, work flows, etc., but even then I’m not sure if every vote should be equal. For instance, should a long-time developer with a dozen contributions to atmosphere have the same say as someone who picked up meteor last month and is struggling with a particular issue? Those two priority lists could look very different, and for good reason.
I think at the least that something like this would give both MDG and meteor users a way to see what the general consensus is about certain priorities and topics?
This isn’t about sorting prioties for different Meteor projects - the original question is “how do we determine which ideas and forum threads should get MDG responses”.
Yes, so I guess what we could do is, every week take a list of threads posted in the last week and sort them by popularity, then respond to the top 10 or something. We could even make it a live video thing or podcast or something!
