1. Agreed. I’ve not voted ’cos I haven’t got my head round it yet. But it’ll all probably come out in the wash, especially as the forum gets more users.
  2. Good plan - try, assess, change if needed, repeat.

Another meta question: I’ve just started a couple of discussions in General that I would really like a lot of discussion on so I can move forward with making those changes, but I fear they may end up drowned out by lots of other threads. Do you think there should be a top level category for “development questions” or something? I can’t think of what a name would be for that. Or maybe the “Needs discussion” tag should be colored (blue?) so they’re more prominent?

Edit:
I made “Needs discussion” a primary category (so it shows in the sidebar) and colored it blue. Let me know what you think of that?

I think I’ve made it so that only I can tag as “Needs discussion”. Could someone confirm that you aren’t able to apply that tag?

    I made @DaveT @Jerud @Jorge mods. Feel free to help out as much as you’d like 🙂. And if anyone else wants to be a mod, let me know. Being a mod makes you able to:

    • Merge similar threads together
    • Split posts out into their own threads
    • Rename threads
    • Lock or delete discussions/posts if they’re bad or spam

    So much here! I’ll try to be as brief as I can:

    • @Jorge ’s concise spelling-out of “tier 1” and “tier 2” is spot on.

    • I agree the process should not be overly granular or it won’t function well

    • Priority Tags: I like the “all grey except urgent” idea. I would also like to see an actual written-out criteria from @Jay in terms of what constitutes each “level” of priority.

    • Re: my “cosmetic issues” concept … rather than a separate tag, I suppose this would just get rolled in with “low” priority – along with functionally low-priority issues. Since it’s a question of the “priority” rather than the nature of the bug, there’s no value in having a separate callout. I have dozens of examples but don’t want to crowd this space any more…but I think it’s relatively evident that a lot of cosmetic problems gives a poor impression of the app.

    • It’s natural to assume that high priority will be done before low…but clearly there needs to be some way that low/medium are worked into the pipeline or else those will just never get done. Presumably voting will come into play here. I think mods should occasionally call attention to threads which are languishing, to “run them up the flagpole and see who salutes”. Could be done via “needs discussion” tag? Threads that get zero traction would then remain in the archive, with a final post on them from the mod stating that they were “promoted” for voting. Future users who search and find that thread would then have clear feedback that the idea had been considered but didn’t get enough support.

    • I like the idea of the dev team “closing the loop” by marking threads they have picked up, and also agree there is little value in getting very granular with that. I suggest we have just three tags total:
      “in queue” (or “queued”) for stuff that Jay has definitively picked up – no detail on priority necessary.
      “ready” or “scheduled” for solved posts that simply haven’t been pushed out to stable yet
      “solved” – this tag already exists

    • I agree with re-scoping the reproducability tag as “needs repro”. Hopefully it can lead to the community helping each other find reproduction steps. @Jay you say that there aren’t a lot of un-reproducible bugs posted – but that’s a kind of reverse survivor bias; I don’t generally post bugs I can’t reproduce (unless they really piss me off or lose data).

    • I like the “needs discussion” tag and top-level menu item. If you have major topics you want to call attention to for discussion, sticky them to the top of that page.

    • Re: “popular” posts – is there not a way to put a “trending” or “popular” category on the menu, that auto-populates with posts that have high activity? I would have expected that to be baked into the forum SW. The current low voting volume might just be due to the newness of the forum. There’s some inertia to overcome there. Manually applying a “popular” tag feels disingenuous.

    • The shortcoming of only having one tag for “mobile” bugs is that it leaves no way to distinguish between bugs that happen on BOTH desktop and mobile vs. those that are desktop-only or mobile-only. What about two tags (“mobile” and “desktop”) – apply both if it’s both? Or is that just not high enough value to the dev team to be worth the trouble?

    • I’m wary of the “scope” tag. As a layperson I am constantly surprised by what is “easy” and what is “hard” even after years of reading beta discussions. I think the value of a simpler tagging scheme is greater than the limited value we can bring to the devs by guessing wildly at how hard we think their jobs are 😇.

    • Re: Tag permissions, I like the proposed where everybody can apply all tags on their own posts (except for the developer-status ones), and mods can change tags on other posts. Simple and understandable, gets the job done.

    Jay Re: “needs discussion” tag: I cannot apply it. But I CAN remove it.
    At least, it will let me un-check it…I didn’t click “OK” to lock in the change so maybe it would have prevented me.

      Pretty much all of the above is about bugs.
      Any thoughts about how Feature Requests should be handled? Separate thread?

      • I’ll post a sticky thread soon about how posting and tagging should work with details about all the tags.

      • Bumping: Just comment on a post would bring it to the top. I don’t think a tag is necessarily required for that. But the original poster or a mod could just comment something like “bump” to bring it up the flagpole.

      • In queue: I’m also hesitant about this because people get annoyed if we say we’ll do something and then it doesn’t happen for a long time. I think ideally the priority levels should give a general idea about where they are in the queue? But let’s see how it goes with the priority system and we could come back to this idea.

      • Repro: I can put something about that in the sticky thread - that you can post a bug you haven’t been able to repro as long as you tag it as such, and maybe someone else will have encountered it and can provide a repro.

      • Popular: If you click on Latest at the top left of the thread list you can change it to Top, which sorts by number of comments. Or Trending is supposed to sort by number of votes but our vote counts are so low at this point it doesn’t quite seem to do that?

      • Scopes: Those should be tags I would apply myself. But I’m not 100% sure it’s the right way to go. I’ll play around with it.

      • Feature requests: I feel like a lot of this applies to feature requests too. But if you have more ideas about that, I think this is a good thread for it.

      • Needs discussion permission for mods: I think I fixed that.

        Jay I like they way tagging ideas have developed 👏.

        Re: Scoping
        I understand concerns about a scoping tag. But I do like the idea of scoping because it shows users / potential users that the devs have though about a feature and have a top level ‘guesstimate’ of how much effort something is.

        This is useful because (a) many a-time in a past life I’ve asked for features that seem trivial to me, but were in fact much harder and (b) the opposite - some features that appear hard, might actually turn out to be relatively straightforward. And for those that you’ve not yet had time to think about you don’t add a scope tag (or add one like ‘YetToScope’). We found that users were much more receptive to things not getting done if our devs had given some though and had a reason(s) why it was hard.

        Also, Scope, has some bearing on Priority. A feature/bug scoped as ‘quick’, and asked for by a fair number of people might get done. But if scoped as ‘hard’ then it might not get done.

        ‘grouping’
        One other thing that we used to try and do in my ‘managing a s/w company days’, was to ‘group’ certain features to address in a dev round. So, for eg., it might be that when done together, apparently un-connected features x, y, and z, allows you to more effectively address a wider market area - in this context maybe it means that WorkFlowy customers no longer have any reason not to use Legend (obvs, I just made that bit up to illustrate the point). But you can’t do this without having a broader view on Legend and where it stands relative to competitors + the direction you want to push it in.

          @David I’m generally creating tasks in my Legend referencing the threads here, and I group them in there. I don’t think there’s a great way to do grouping here without having to create a new tag for each group?

          Jay Pretty spot on - you’ve nailed all that’s salient very succinctly.

          One major comment: Give users an idea of what urgent is - data loss obvs, not being able to login in, ++. Otherwise everyone’s bug / feature is urgent ’cos it’s just occured to them. Indications will help to calm things down.

          Minor: There’s a double ‘period’ at end of How to triage para.

          Re: Forum features: I really like this 👍. Maybe it’s a separate sticky for other people to add tips and tricks? And / or has a link to 3rd party doc ‘Flarum hints and tips’ (or similar)?

          • Jay replied to this.

              At one point, @Jay and I talked about how some requests are “far future”. Meaning that the requester knows the scope is huge, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon (if at all) – but it’s still an idea about how Legend can be used, and may have value. Should we have a way to tag those kinds of requests?

              @Jay , is it possible to “organize” the tags so they are grouped-up a little better?
              Especially for the “priority” tags it’s a bit quicker to find the one you want when they’re arranged together.

              • Jay replied to this.

                DaveT Thanks, I added details about what defines Urgent and fixed the ..

                Jerud I think for now people can just mention that in the text and tag it low priority and I’ll scope it to the right size. I’m a bit hesitant to add too many different tags because it could get overwhelming to manage, so I think let’s see how this goes for a while and we can add more if needed?

                As for tag order, it seems Flarum orders them by popularity. It annoys me too. There doesn’t seem to be any way to change it.

                    @Jay - I’d be happy to help mod as well if you’d like more help.

                    • Jay replied to this.

                      Are “Priority: Low” and “Low Severity” Tags supposed to co-exist?
                      If so, how should they be used?

                      • Jay replied to this.

                        Also, is there a way to write a thread or send a DM to “mods only”?
                        That might be useful to occasionally discuss an unclear topic, or just get consistent guidance.

                        The idea being that regular users are not able to see these conversations.

                        • Jay replied to this.

                          Jerud No. I’m planning to triage all instances of Low Severity, tag them otherwise, and remove that tag. I just haven’t had a chance to yet.

                          Jerud That’s a good idea. I added a Mods tag that’s only for discussion amongst Mods: https://forum.legendapp.com/t/mods

                              Powered by: FreeFlarum.
                              (remove this footer)