Comment 1 by Shaimaa on 2012-04-11 15:48
Hi, I strongly agree with the idea of ticket voting. users will get more involved and this will enhance the NVDA user experience.

Comment 2 by ateu on 2012-04-16 14:38
Hi,

I really like this idea, as it allows for the developers knowing how important is a tycket for the users.

Thanks

Comment 3 by MHameed on 2012-07-21 02:25
Any feedback for this issue?
Thanks.

Comment 4 by briang1 on 2012-07-21 08:17
The majority of users do not actually have accounts on the web site. We might rather than increase participation make it skewed so that only the people who do have accounts call the shots on what needs to be done.
If you let everyone in however, you run the risk of a bit of a nightmare of repeated requests from the same folk etc.
I don't know the answer, maybe there needs to be a regular email to the announce group and some way to respond that way, however, its going to be time consuming for some person.
(I'm no volunteering!)

It might be more useful to just monitor the other lists and act on the feel of what is being said.

Comment 5 by jteh on 2012-07-23 00:09
In principle, I agree with this idea.

The Trac plugin you linked should be compatible. However, because it's designed for all resources (not just tickets), it adds a context navigation entry for voting, which probably won't be found by most users. (Context navigation is the bit just above "Download in other formats" which currently contains links for previous and next tickets.) Also, because it's not part of the ticket itself, we can't run queries based on votes. (Note that we use the new Trac query system, not the old reports system.) These issues mean we're going to need to modify this plugin or write our own.

Comment 6 by jteh on 2012-10-01 03:58
On further reflection, I think this is a bad idea and not worth doing. It doesn't provide any indication of what is actually important or what priorities should be.

• Most users has their own little feature they want implemented, but they don't necessarily have any idea how that fits into the project as a whole. For example, everyone might vote for UI changes, but that leaves major bugs unfixed. Sure, you can ignore such things and just work on what we feel is most important, but then what's the point of the votes?
• We also don't have the funding to work on a lot of stuff, so it won't necessarily get done anyway, making them even more useless.
• You say this makes people feel they have a say in the project, but they already do. As developers, we're already pretty aware of what users tend to want most based on comments, people CCed on bugs, etc.
• Often, votes are just a response to someone advocating for people to vote for an issue if they like it, which results in a very skewed perception of its popularity. Essentially, they provide a way for a user to say "me too" without providing any justification, use cases, etc. 100 people saying "yes, I'd like application specific settings" is far less useful than people explaining why they need them, how they would use them, how important they really are in their daily lives, etc. There's also no real effort involved. While you don't want to make things unnecessarily complicated, 0 effort = 0 thought process for many people.

Perhaps a more effective way to solicit feedback on major issues is to run surveys or polls every now and then. This is far more useful, as it allows for more specific, thorough feedback.

Nevertheless, I looked into the existing vote plugin again. I suppose we could just use that and enable the reports module for that. We'd want to get rid of the ability for users to down-vote, though, but that shouldn't be too hard.

Comment 7 by briang1 on 2012-10-02 08:56
Now are tickets the right place for feature requests in any case? Seems to me it might be more useful to have seperate places for bugs and features.
If you do have surveys you could in fact link specifically to the prospective next steps in development and ask what else might be of use and an explanation of why, in a specific field rather than in the ticket system.

Comment 8 by steverep80 on 2015-02-05 22:03
I think this is both a good idea, and a good discussion that needs to be revitalized. I would really like a way to see that my comments on existing tickets are somehow counting as a "vote" for that feature, and sometimes all that requires is a click because the authors/commenters have already said all that needs to be said. As a developer, I'd want some sort of analytical data on what would be most useful to the entire user base. And, ultimately, there is nothing stopping the core administrators from deciding what is higher priority to work on (e.g. a severe bug with 1 vote is clearly higher priority than a feature with 1000 votes, and a simple enhancement with 100 votes could of course be justified as higher priority than a complicated major request with 10,000 votes). The bottom-line for me would be having something to vote with that produces a measurement, rather than nothing at all.

Comment 9 by bhavyashah on 2015-02-07 06:03
Not much to say (because all has been already said), but I definitely fully agree with steverep80.

Hi:
We now use github, so should this be closed?

Irrelevant now that we're on GitHub.