Hi to all registered users, we need your help and suggestions.
As you know we’re planning WIP voting feature soon. This is feature where you’ll be able to vote for new features to appear in Renoise faster. It will be fully democratic voting - the majority wins and if possible (if it fits our current schedule) this feature comes before others, less requested in new version. But like real democracy minority features are also taken into consideration and are not disregarded.
It will be limited to registered users ONLY - while we cannot even theoretically accept all suggestions, we can do it much more easily for all of you that actually paid for Renoise - this is simple difference between those that are serious about using Renoise and those that are not - may not be fair, but is true (and more fair to developers also). Also if you are unregistered, you have to accept the fact that registered users need to have few things more in their inventory (and there will be more in the future).
So on to what we need from you:
How voting will be organized: what features it will have, how it will be done…
Suggestions to voting procedure, what is allowed, what is not
Improtant: it must be fully democratic type of voting! i.e. majority wins, no cheating etc.
Voting outline:
Registered users go to special user pages
There they can add their votes for currently suggested features: only 1 vote/registered user - this is only fair voting
They can also add their own features (but with limited number of features/month - so the user needs to choose the most important features withing current month and not add 10’s of them)
Single added feature outline:
Feature name (few letters description i.e. 2-3 words)
Feature description (more detailed description, i.e. few sentences)
Feature icon (no big deal just to make it fancy looking
Feature # votes (only positive votes, no negative votes, negative votes are actually no-votes).
Feature date added
WIP results are public: they will be visible on WIP page so everybody can comment them on forum.
Now, read these and decide if they are good enough, if certain feature needs improvement/workout and give us suggestions how would you like this to look like on WIP page/user page.
maybe organize it differently, like collecting all suggestions and then let people vote for the things they want first.
And you need to have a system to seperate between suggestions which require alot of work and those which require only a small amount … lets face it, some suggestions made on the board could be done in a short time and dont mean big changes to the program, others do, and therefor the should be a seperation, or to say it in other words, if I wish a yellow-skin for renoise (for example) which could be done rather easy I would not like it to be delayed for months just because taktik is working on a reakor-like synthesizer as renoise-built-in-instrument. (rather strange example but I guess you get what I mean)
also a seperation between “upgrades” and “changes” should be done, because people should be able to vote if they want something to be better or something to change completely (or if they want a and/or for a change).
maybe do the voting with distributable points, collect all suggestions and people can give points to the suggestions they like most, for example you get 10 points and if there are 5 suggestions you can distribute those ten points between them, 6 for the one you really want, 2 for the two you would like to see and no points for the ones you dont care about.
also you have to think about sub-votes, like when people agree “we need another behaviour for this” then there should be a new vote how it should actually be changed.
and drop that icon thing, that sounds stupid (hey, my suggestion is crap, but my icon is sooo cool )
Adding features directly into the voting system shouldn’t be possible. It has to be moderated by someone in the Renoise Team, so duplicate features don’t get added and the list doesn’t get bloated in any way. The add feature form used by users could simply be sent as an email to the developer(s) who’d do this, or it might even be enough that users suggest features on the forum.
the system should have a way to put a “suggestion for the suggestion”, abling users to let you notice if there are, for example, some unconsidered drawbacks in adding that new feature.
I know this could lead to unmanageable situations, but given that only registered users could add them maybe the thing is bearable.
I think discussions are best kept where they are now, this forum. In some time (I don’t know when), there will also be a registered users only section of this forum. If there are special drawbacks to consider with some feature, it should of course be written as you say IT-Alien. But I still think this too should be moderated. Maybe have a “comments to moderator” field to let users notify him if there are something important.
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