Upgrade Discource Features to include voting, tagging

Love this request @helloitse, was going to in fact post myself something like this and I found it!

A lot of the other up-and-coming tools out there allow the ability to vote-up features. Some have it in Discourse, off the top of my head:

  • AirTable
  • Asana
  • Monday

And ClickUp famously does this, but in another tool Canny and I think that has gotten out of control more than they bargained for…

I agree we have dup requests in here, and may basic requests around things like “recurring Tasks” that kick around in various places, and it would be great just to see the simple request, votes, and possibly see Team Fibery responses as to when we could expect that stuff.

This forum is great, I think you guys have Coda and Notion both beat with more real commentary around what you’re planning, but as users and feature request grow, I think this organization is really essential. The reason I was going to request this is I’m myself having some trouble trying to figure out what’s really a Fibery priority, and what isn’t.

Things that have been discussed, that would be great for my use, but remain vague as to their delivery:

  • Multiple-State Kanban:

Key stuff like WIP, Cycle Time, etc.

  • Activity Stream:

really hard for me to function without this

  • Phone # type

Not sure what complexities are here, but I’d surely add my vote, and nothing from Fibery team since 2019.

And there are many other examples.

Thanks!

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We have been chatting today here about the subject of collecting votes for Feature Requests for Fibery.

@mdubakov, I’ve been meaning to respond to your post below, but I wanted to swing the convo back to this original thread on the subject, as it was continuing on @Oshyan’s original post that wasn’t intended to discuss the topic.

I remain concerned about the Fibery roadmap and prioritization. I think this Voting board would go a great way to solving my anxiety. Over the last few weeks I made my biggest commitment yet to Fibery, but I am doing this with many key features I need missing, in the hope that they will be delivered as they have been, loosely, responded to as “good ideas” for the most part in this forum - which sorry to say is exactly how @oshyan describes the way Notion flippantly responds to requests. I say “loosely” because there is no strong roadmap indicator here in Discourse

I watch like a hawk all Fibery’s publicly released info, and the latest round of releases plus WIP:

…is striking me as increasingly disparate from the desires of what I see posted here in Discourse. We can only guess at what Fibery is picking up internally from users, and clearly Michael and team have stated that’s a big source of prioritization for them. However, I continue to be puzzled about the poor state of this community vis a vis Feature Requests in light of the Fibery team self-admittedly so driven by user feedback.

I agree that the “+1” is not something Product Teams should base a lot of decisions on, this is well known in the Product Management Space. We all like to get use cases around features when planning. But that type of deep feedback is valuable and rare. I think you are cutting out good value feedback, albeit not as strong as “use-case” based feedback, if you decide to simply not accept “+1” type votes.

Right now it seems the Fibery team is delivering a high amount of integrations, and recently a lot of bug fixes. I have not seen in the WIP many of the big items talked about here in the forum, such as:

  • Automations - have never seen them on any WIP, yet they have been talked about in detail Michael’s blog since early last year
  • Activity Stream
  • Better Notifications
  • Due Date handling
  • Useable Time Tracking that doesn’t require a developer to set up
  • If not a native app, a Responsive Design mobile experience so Fibery is actually useable on a Mobile platform
  • Dashboard/home area
  • Entity History (this is not the same as Activity Stream to clarify)
  • Indexing something besides Entity title in Search
  • Versioning of Docs/Entities

These are all “quality of life” essentials that have been mostly acknowledged by the team at one point or another. Yet they seem increasingly low priority. I am left to wonder if we had a voting system, how strong would the support be for users such as myself who really have trouble using Fibery in a Product Team with all this stuff missing. As it stands there is no real way to voice support for these features other than commenting in an existing thread, creating a new similar one, or trying to “heart” such a request. And if you do support such a request, you are left only to hope somebody at Fibery responds as the only means to gauge whether it is considered viable or not. With a voting board everybody can see how important a request is, including Team Fibery.

While it was good for Michael to surface some of the Fibery roadmap, the reality is all we could see there are items that have votes, but it’s unclear exactly how you are gathering them. In particular, I am curious of the value of the “heart” on Feature Requests, the next best thing we have here to “votes.” I’m sure many users try to add votes that way, it’s the way of the internet nowadays to “heart” stuff you support. But it’s not clear the detail of how these votes are assimilated.

I compared some of your request you surfaced from Vizy vs. the community here.

  • There is a popular one, Phone Number Field, that I count to have 6 votes of support: 4 distinct users wrote support, and there are 2 hearts from other users. Yet you have only “3” points for this in your Vizy. This also would appear to be a relatively easy add, but maybe there are technical challenges around this one I don’t understand? It would be good to hear from you guys on that.

  • The aforementioned versioning I count as having 10 votes - between the hearts and distinct discussions. Yet I can’t find this at all in your list of features in Vizy, am I missing something?

Neither of these has never appeared in a WIP declaration. And since you haven’t actually addressed either in a year, there is no real hope among users about whether these will come.

Now with this latest WIP, I am left still wondering when can we expect any of the features in the top group to actually be released, such as key ones like Entity-level permissions or Entity History, to name a few?

I don’t understand is where the current WIP is coming from. I am pretty surprised by the most recent stretch of Integrations: Trello, Jira (these two are unquestionably direct competitors) Discourse, Braintree. There was talk for months about some very big integrations that are absolutely key for product teams: Calendar, Email, Figma - all seem to have traction in the Vizy list. I personally requested Bitbucket and I also saw a request for that on Twitter. I haven’t seen mention of any of those for an age. However, Discourse and Braintree really surprise me. I can’t find either in your Vizy list. And I don’t mean to ruffle feathers, but those seem to be almost a need of the Fibery team itself more than its users. I never even heard of Braintree among the 10’s of payment processors out there until I saw Fibery using it, and I process 6 figures online annually. And I have seen in only one other case a Discourse integration - Coda - which coincidentally also uses it. I have never seen a tool in this space that would integrate with both Discourse and Braintree. So unless there are some users directly requesting these that are somehow separate from what you surfaced in your Vizy list, this doesn’t seem like the prioritization that the community is after. Until @Oshyan mentioned Discourse the other day, presumably from reading the above WIP, I hadn’t seen either Braintree or Discourse mentioned here in the community, either.

I am trying to wait patiently for items off that list above, and other things to come in Fibery that would make it useable by a high-performing Product Team on a daily basis. I don’t seem to get much support for my pleas about more guidance on these basic needs, and increasingly I doubt the priority of them with the Fibery team. Almost every day I contemplate going back to Notion, so I can, for example:

  • actually respond to a comment from that comment in the activity stream without having to open the Page and, presumably due to a bug, have the Notification panel disappear when you try to go back and click it again (I plan to post this bug later);
  • I can Edit/Change Fields without having to redo from scratch. Such as a single-select into a multi-select, or in the Fibery case, edit a relation if it turns out that a one-to-one needs to become a many-to-one, or move a Page that should live in another Table (in other words, an Entity should live in another Type)
  • Or I want to bulk update status on several Entities at once.
  • Or use a more user-friendly date picker

Fibery is so superior in so many ways in its basic approach than anything else out there. It’s a great shame that these basics continue to get pushed back. And your guys’ insistence to leave this board fragmented with lots of repeated requests, many “hearted” requests that aren’t clearly acknowledged, is making it increasingly harder to commit.

I hope you reconsider adding the votes. It would also make you guys more accountable to those in here spending their valuable time providing feedback. As a Product Manager, surely you appreciate that for every user that takes time to write you feedback, there are many with the same problem who won’t take the time. And without a voting system, you block an easy way for them to be heard, too.

Your concerns are valid and I sympathize. I understand that you may be worried about strange features like Braintree integration, but we need this ourselves (and we are a product company as well). Integration Team is focusing on integrations and don’t pick other areas so far.

As for other things in progress, they are must have for the Fibery 2.0 release.

After the release we are going to focus on the following things:

  • Entity History
  • Better Notifications
  • Docs/Entities Sharing
  • Permissions: better UI, entity-level permissions
  • Open Integration platform
  • Automations

These are just plans and they can be changed, but at least that what we have now in mind.

3 Likes

Michael, always so good to hear from you and thank you for all that.

I still think a lot of this indicates how a board with votes could help. Are you willing to address the discrepancies I am speaking of between what we here in the community are putting effort in to request and explain need to you, when at the same time internally you seem to have those features with fewer weight than here in the community?

I also want to clarify that I am also in charge or Product, and I fully appreciate that you can’t go promising features and commit as in software development in particular things are too hard to predict. But if you had votes on the features here, there is no reason you have to simultaneously obligate to things that are the highest requested. You can use the forum here in fact to communicate about those items while in fact not necessarily developing them. That’s a very healthy way to interact with your users I think and be transparent about your product.

Thanks again

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I want to repeat again that we receive about 60% of feedback from Intercom, 20% from private conversations and 20% from this forum. Votes here will be misleading. You will think that this is the top idea, but it might be number 20 in combined feedback list.

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Ok understood, but you didn’t actually answer the question about why posts here in the community seem to have more support than you guys have in your internal board. I can’t speak for others, but this is a very disturbing reality for me. I simply don’t understand why you can’t address that there appear to be 6 votes for Phone # Field in the community, this being a feature essential to my own CRM efforts, while in your published board you have 3. Even if you hadn’t surfaced that internal board, the fact that you guys practically are ignoring that request here also brings into question how much you value particular feedback here in Discourse. Again, this may not be an issue for others, but this is something I take very seriously when choosing a tool.

Thanks.

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Indeed we did not record all Discourse feedback, but it will change after integration. That was the point of it, to combine feedback from all sources in a single place.

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Michael, thanks. Well that should help, glad to hear you guys are up for making sure the votes here in the forum are counted accurately. I think that’s an important declaration that I haven’t often seen from other similar tools running public boards.

I wish you guys continued good luck as you move along towards Fibery 2.0 and hopeful successful release of all the features you plan, on time and bug free!

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[DONE] :grin: Now go vote!

This is an exciting development. However, I am wondering how are we going to group similar ideas so we know where to vote?

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Yes, I am wondering the same thing. I scrolled through the Feature Request area recently and there is definitely a need for some cleanup, merging of similar requests, etc.

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I’ll handle that in near future

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Excellent. May I also suggest that you create sub-categories for “Complete” and/or “Rejected” type requests? That way one can scroll through the Feature Request category and everything is something you can vote on. When someone is looking for whether a request has already been made, scrolling is probably now how they’d do it, they’d search, and results for “complete” and “rejected” sub-categories would still show up. It would just get them out of the way and further clean up the Feature Request list.

Edit: I can see the Vote plugin has a “closed” state which releases votes, so that’s good. But AFAIK the closed feature request topic still shows in the “Suggest Ideas” category and there is no way to filter them in a search either. Having these in a separate category solves both those issues.

I’ve enabled a filter, so you can filter solved/unsolved in this category now

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Great, so you will use “Solved” (plugin functionality) to indicate a feature has been implemented?

Another related question, since Fibery itself supports integration with Discourse, including “hearts”, and you use the integration internally, have you added support for importing vote results to Fibery as well?

@mdubakov I see you are editing the subject of a bunch of topics here to include the area of Fibery they relate to. I’m wondering, why are you not using Discourse tags for this instead? It seems like a more consistent and easily parsed approach.

Gosh! Thank you for the hint, switching to tags :slight_smile:

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You’re very welcome, of course!

If you want people to be able to tag their own topics (which you can later change) but not create tags, that is an option. Or you can disallow people from even using tags, and only admins can tag, which may help maintain consistency in your back-end, but will be more work for you guys to categorize things. Then again “not tagged” might be a useful indicator that a topic has not really been “engaged with” yet, its “disposition not yet determined”, and once you figure out what you want to do with it, you tag it… :thinking:

Now that you have this in place, I suggest adding this theme component to the categories where voting is allowed:

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Hmm, we seem to have lost this Theme Component?