Feedback Site: Suggestions for improving signal to noise ratio

I appreciate everyone's concern. We're somewhat limited with what we can change in terms of this 3rd party platform - but we are discussing changes/needs with the vendor - and tweaking the things we can to improve the experience.

Ultimately, any system is open to abuse. Rather than try to impose any hard limits, I'll try and update the FAQ and Getting Starting topic on a regular basis and take in account suggestions like these as part of the guidelines.

Victoria did a great job with her How do I write a feature request? post.

It's nice being able to point users at that post or the FAQ when we see them painting outside the lines.

Perhaps we need something similar for the other topic types.

I'll also address the "Ask a Question" topic. One of the reasons we chose this platform is it addresses something that we've discovered from fielding feature requests for years. Often, when people request a feature, they ask for something that already exists, so in essence, they're asking us a question and we can turn that Idea into a "Question" topic type. If we get lots of these questions, we can turn them in FAQs. Also, many times feature requests are people asking for a bug/unexpected behavior to be fixed.

As I mentioned in this post "When to Create a Feature Request vs a Problem Report?" Each of the topic types is essentially a problem in different clothes. An Idea is trying to solve a workflow problem. A Problem is trying to solve an unexpected behavior/bug. A question is trying to solve a usability problem. I curate the topic types so they get reviewed internally by the appropriate people. I wouldn't spend too much time thinking or worrying about topic types too much.

I'll also address employee participation. Are the topics read by Adobe employees? Yes. Do we respond to each post? No - but we read all of them. Most ideas don't need a response if we understand what the idea is. We also want to see how topics organically grow. I didn't respond to this thread immediately to allow others in the community pipe in.

You will see participation ebb and flow - and nearly disappear at times. Why? We have deadlines. Most of the teams work in 'sprints' which is a development process term. At the beginning of a sprint, we decide what we're going to work on - so often you'll see more participation at the beginning of that period. But once work starts, people tend to focus in to solve the task at hand and meet that sprint deadline. As we get deeper into the cycle, it gets more and more intense. Please don't worry about us getting distracted. It's my job, and a handful of others, to triage the 'hot' topics and guide them to the right people.

Have we seen an increase of noise? Yes. There are some people that overly frenetic. I've addressed a few people offline with gentle suggestions or reminders - and will continue to do that.

We've also introduced the Feedback tab on our Facebook page, disabled the feature request User to User forums, and turned off the web-form on Adobe.com for feature requests/bug reports to point that traffic towards this site. We're getting more variety of users in terms of product use and experience visiting the site now.

When we set up the site initially, Jordan Davis and I had to make a call on whether we segregated each of our products as separate communities or create one community for the whole family. There was no 'right' decision. Both options had their disadvantages. Ultimately, we decided that there is a relationship, an overlap and synergy between the products. We are a family - and we consider our users as part of that family.

I appreciate everyone's continued support - especially the folks that are active helping to foster a positive experience, clarifying requests and answering questions.

Sorry John - I think I broke the 1000 character limit.

I think it would also help to have a little more clarification between the purpose of this forum and the purpose of the U2U forum, and the intended differences between the two, so that everyone's on the same page and misunderstandings are minimized.

Perhaps if the "negative like" were phrased as a "Not important to my workflow" instead. You could have two, perhaps three options:

1. I need this for my workflow
2. Not important to my workflow
3. Would probably never use in my workflow

Thus far there seems to be resistance to the 'negative like'. If it were an explanation built in opposite the Like, I think it might fly.

As for emoticons? I am for there banishment from all online worlds everywhere. I mean, 'emoticons' isn't even in my Win 7 64 spell checker!

I made a different suggestion on the same topic:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Re "Limit the length of any one post. Maybe 1000 characters?":

A length limit would be problematic for bug reports, for which this site is now the official vehicle.

A good problem report can often include a lot more detail than will fit into 1000 characters. I skimmed the 101 "Problem" reports for Lightroom on this site, and I found 19 unique posters (including 4 employees and Victoria Brampton, not including Rob Cole) with posts at least 1100 characters; the posts of 10 of the posters were longer than 1500.

3862, Doug Cooper
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...
Response from Adobe employee: "The team really appreciates your help in tracking down this bug".

2526, David Franzen (employee)
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1958, A TJ
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1732, TK
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1670, JezE
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1527, MetaWops
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1512, Benjamin Warde (Employee)
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1508, Ben.garland
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1487, Steve Hughes
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1443, Brian Wilson
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1329, Paul
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1306, David Franzen (employee)
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1295, Greg Kraushaar
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...
Adobe employee filed an internal bug report on this

1228, John R. Ellis
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1191, Alexander unavailable
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1180, Zach Purdom
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1175, Dan Tull (employee)
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1122, Victoria Brampton
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

1100, Sven Beller
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Indeed it has been evident that some individuals have adopted this venue as their personal bully pulpit ... unfortunately, when the message is a continuous lone voice, one has to wonder if eventually the comments are falling upon deaf ears ... not sure what the answer is but there is more than a modicum of truth to the concern that John has presented ...

-1 vote.

For my part, I will be creating a Lightroom blog and offloading more to the U2U forums as well.

For your part, feel free to not read anything that doesn't interest you, and use the delete key liberally on your emailer, or remove yourself from notifications, once you are no longer interested in a topic.

I personally don't care how much other people post, as long as its relevant.

Summary:
========
I'm aware that at least part of this thread is due to my relatively prolific posting, and I am trying to respect other people's feelings, and trying to keep the word count down (I'm sure it doesn't seem like it to some of y'all, but its true) and do some offloading... - but also: learning to ignore is a worthwhile skill to develop.

And lastly in my defense:
--------------------------------
I absolutely do not use these forums to "call attention to myself", nor many of the other things I am regularly accused of - those are often mis-interpretations on other peoples part - indicative of their personal problems, not mine.

So to restate the original question, does the forum software have options to:

1. Limit the max length of a post - and can it be defined differently for bugs?
2. Limit the number of posts individuals can make in a period?
3. Remove or limit the "How does this make you feel" text?

John

Best way to improve signal/noise ratio is to increase signal and decrease noise.

I agree with Victoria - lets ALL try and do that.

I feel the best incentive for being concise is that it maximises the chances to be heard, to have impact.

Regarding forum limitations: I think the forum should make it easy to do the right thing, but not try to be restrictive thus potentially making it hard to do the right thing.

Regarding the requested "-1 vote" feature: I think that has the potential to support a lot of undesirable negativity. There is a point to be economical with "+1" votes but there would be no natural limit to excessive "-1" voting.

There are already mechanisms in place to deal with the top 2 concerns:

1. If you think a post is inappropriate due to verbosity (or for any other reason), just click the inappropriate link and cite "too long" (or whatever) as the reason.

2. Each new Idea should stand on its own merit, regardless of the originator, nor how many ideas they've had in the past. If you think an Idea is inappropriate, just click the inappropriate link and give reasons...

Regarding emoticons - I think they're kinda fun, but I'm aware that some folk get bent out of shape when others use them.

Reminder: increasing noise without increasing signal does not increase the signal/noise ratio. - I think this whole thread is mostly noise, including this post...