Redoing the WordPress Ideas Forum

[dancole]

Jeffro has become more active in moderating the WordPress.org Ideas Forum.

I've also written a post on 3 things I would change about the Ideas Forum: http://dan-cole.com/redo-wp-ideas/

What are everyone's thoughts on what should be changed about the WordPress Ideas Forum?

Would forum members be interested in contributing to a bbPress plugin that would implement changes to the Ideas Forum? We could ask for a Trac install on WordPress.org for WordPress.org used software, we could host it here in the forum, or find a third party site like GIT Hub. It would require knowing PHP and HTML, some CSS and JavaScript (jQuery) wouldn't hurt either. I would think that a minimum of 5 hours would be requires to implement a modest addition to the plugin.

Why don't we throw around what should be changed and see where it goes from there.

[dancole]

I would ideally:

1. Change the 5-star system to a +1/-1 point system. Show votes for and against, and total. I'd also like to show those at percentages too.
2. Make each idea time-dependant, meaning a Go, No-go (try again later) type deal.
3. Allow people to select a representative to vote on their behalf, but with some minimum requirements to discourage cheating and gaming the system.

[chipbennett]

I would ideally:

1. Change the 5-star system to a +1/-1 point system. Show votes for and against, and total. I'd also like to show those at percentages too.
2. Make each idea time-dependant, meaning a Go, No-go (try again later) type deal.
3. Allow people to select a representative to vote on their behalf, but with some minimum requirements to discourage cheating and gaming the system.

Take a look at the Ubuntu Brainstorm forum. It might have some good ideas/functionality to emulate.

I especially like how each thread is presented as a problem or issue, with multiple suggestions to address/solve the problem - and each suggestion has +1/0/-1 vote buttons, with Net vote being displayed.

Also, contributors gain "reputation" by having their suggestions voted up (and lose by having them voted down) - though I would like to see "reputation" based on # of suggestions offered, # of ideas voted, etc. - rather than just on the popularity of suggestions offered.

Anyway, it's an interesting and somewhat unique model. Anything there that the WordPress Ideas forum might be able to borrow?

[dancole]

Take a look at the Ubuntu Brainstorm forum. It might have some good ideas/functionality to emulate.

• Multiple solutions that can be voted on
• Solutions and Comments as separate items
• Support This Idea Banners
• Report as Dup. with required form field to say which one it's a Dup. of.
• Status of Idea (Sandbox, Popular, In Development, Complete)
• Link to the relevant Trac ticket once there is one or other resources like the mailing list.
• Related Ideas
• Search / Sort Features

[chipbennett]

• Multiple solutions that can be voted on
• Solutions and Comments as separate items
• Support This Idea Banners
• Report as Dup. with required form field to say which one it's a Dup. of.
• Status of Idea (Sandbox, Popular, In Development, Complete)
• Link to the relevant Trac ticket once there is one or other resources like the mailing list.
• Related Ideas
• Search / Sort Features

+1 to all of the above... +100 to Duplicate Reporting mechanism!

[dancole]

Here are some more ideas:

• Use BuddyPress (Groups, Forums, Posts, Comments and custom meta types.)
• Sort comments by rating
• Sort comments by For / Against
• List people who have joined an idea
• Invite people to an idea
• Tagging Ideas

The advantage of using BuddyPress is that WordPress would be the underlining software. It would be easier for us to develop. It also seams more flexible in my mind. Fitting it in with WordPress.org Profiles would be another plus. Using BuddyPress and WordPress plugins could shorten development time.

[Jeffro]

I like the idea of the +1 -1 instead of the 5 star rating system. Just make sure someone can change their mind. They could vote yes but after some discussion, they may want to change that to a no.

The time-dependent idea is sort of implemented already with the Maybe Later or In Progress categories. I imagine that the Maybe Later category would be used quite a bit instead of out right deleting or removing an idea after time has expired.

The multiple solutions idea is interesting because although the initial idea might be good, someone in the comments or discussion may come up with something better on top of that but in order to vote for that, they would need to create a new idea submission. Your multi idea voting system would eliminate the need to create a new submission. I like it. If this were implemented, how would it work? Would I be able to vote for any idea as if it was separate or will I need to take my vote back from the initial idea in order to use it for the better idea presented in the same thread? Hope I made that clear.

Solutions and Comments as Separate items - This could easily be done with a color variation of the comment that makes up the solution. Just like the highlighting of post author comments.

Support this idea banners seems like a cool idea. How do you suggest something like that is implemented? Would it be some sort of PNG file that has an embed code with a unique ID that matches with the URL of the idea?

Report of dup sounds good although it would be even better if during the idea submission process, the text in the idea title performed a search of the Ideas forum and presented possible related or the same ideas. This would only help avoid dupes and who knows, I don't think people follow the one Digg uses and they still submit duplicate articles.

Status of ideas is already handled by the categorization system.

Links to relevant trac tickets makes complete sense for ideas under consideration as well as In Progress. I'm guessing someone would have to keep an eye on both systems and manually link up the two. Other than that, how would something like this work?

Right now, the only way to report spam or something else with an idea post is to add the modlook tag to the idea. There is no way to flag an individual comment as spam. I'd like to see this changed. Maybe if enough reports on a specific comment as spam could trigger the comment to be moved to the Akismet moderation queue. I was thinking that if the comment received enough -1 votes that it would trigger the move but I wouldn't want someone with a terrible idea to be flagged as spam :P

As for using BuddyPress instead of bbPress for the ideas system, I'm not sure if maybe that's overkill.

I'm all for adding more ways to sort and search the ideas forum.

Whatever we can add to the ideas forum where more hands could handle the bulk of the work with an admin or two simply overseeing things, I'm for.