Kbin feature requests may be better housed in the project's issue tracker

There have been a lot of threads these last few days discussing the current feature-set of /kbin. While it's good to go out there and get a sense of what's the prevailing opinions are, it's probably actually better for the project as a whole that actual feature requests be lodged at the issue tracker.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues

Open source projects, and their code repositories, are often treated as the exclusive domain of coders, but the rest of us can actually help guide project engineers by contributing ideas. And like all contributions, they really belong in the project's repository, where they can be viewed in a single location not only by the project's maintainer, but by other code contributors who may see ideas listed and want to take on the task of implementing them.

So, rather than having the same feature down in the 87th comment of a dozen different threads, where code contributors are not likely to see them, let's get them up there front and centre!

DarkThoughts,

I would like to hear @ernest opinion about this first. Because to me, issue trackers are for bug reports, not for suggestions. Everyone has different opinions, so it could quickly end up in spamming the issue tracker with a bunch of suggestions of varying quality, reducing the visibility for actual issues that should get fixed. Some stuff like better default settings (disabling privacy sensitive options & enabling reply notifications come to mind) might be valid issue tracker topics though.

joan,
joan avatar

The advantage of using kbin itself for ideas and feature requests is that each suggestion can be upvoted/downvoted and discussed by anyone, so you can tell what people want the most and what is not so popular.

IMHO the issue tracker should be used to track 1. actual issues and 2. features that have been accepted and will be worked on.

Kichae,

Couldn't disagree more. The Calckey issue tracker turned the project into a full-fledged community project. Discussions about features on kbin are a total mess, with the same issues being discussed in 8 different places, and filled with comments talking about totally different features.

If kbin is where these discussions take place, then they need to be much more strictly moderated for them to be useful.

joan,
joan avatar

All important projects I have worked on have this dichotomy with one public facing forum with user proposals and one more internal bug tracker with more technical discussions. Often you can also have a dedicated suggestion system with voting, Blender has this for example, and the kbin UI seems perfect for that.

Yes it's down to having someone moderating the forum side of things and basically doing pre-triage and de-duplication on the suggestions. But otherwise you'll get users asking requests for features that already exist or that don't make sense, etc. It will make the issue tracker a lot more noisy, I think having the user suggestions in a draft space can act as a filter and keep the bug tracker manageable.

0x1C3B00DA,
0x1C3B00DA avatar

Kbin doesn't have a team behind it; it has a single developer. He can't triage issues on kbin and an issue tracker and also develop the software. Your suggestion makes a lot of sense for a more established project, but I don't think its feasible for kbin until things stabilize.

EDIT: Though that's a great way for anybody to get started contributing to kbin. Jump into threads in /m/kbinMeta to get more information about requests and then file issues on the issue tracker. I'm sure /u/ernest would love the help

0x1C3B00DA,
0x1C3B00DA avatar

Super agree with @Kichae here. This is why issue trackers exist. There's no way developers could take anything meaningful from hundreds of threads suggesting slight tweaks to existing functionality, completely overhauling certain features, language improvements, etc, sometimes in conflicting ways. Kbin doesn't have or need the tools to triage software issues.

@joan

joan,
joan avatar

The alternative you seem to suggest is to have these hundreds of threads posted directly in the issue tracker… I don't see how that solves anything, on the contrary it will just make it that much harder for code contributors to find and work on the bugs and the agreed upon enhancements.

Triage has to happen anyway, whether the feature requests are posted in codeberg or here. By having them here they are buffered to figure out which ones are good or bad.

Shortcake,
Shortcake avatar

Having them all in one place is what most devs want. They can mark duplicates as such, triage them in terms of importance and big fixes vs feature requests etc. While having less clutter is better, talking about them on kbin won't help ernest. Most devs will request you make a github/codebase issue so they can find it easily

0x1C3B00DA,
0x1C3B00DA avatar

Really, I expect that the extra login would discourage a lot of people from taking the time to post a quick suggestion/request so there would be much less duplicates. And as /u/shortcake said in a sibling comment, devs almost always want issues filed on the tracker where they can manage them. Issue trackers were built for developers so they could triage issues. kbin doesn't have a way to hide/archive posts, set a priority, assign the issue to someone, tag the issue, assign the issue to a release, etc.

joan,
joan avatar

I agree 100% for issues but this thread is about feature requests.

0x1C3B00DA,
0x1C3B00DA avatar

Issue doesn't just mean bug, it means any request to change the software for whatever reason. Sometimes an issue is a bug, sometimes an issue is a request. Most developers only want to look in a single tracker for issues and want all of those triaging features for all issues.

You can definitely keep submitting any issues here on kbin. What I'm arguing is that your issues are less likely to get traction here and putting them on the issue tracker gives them a better chance to be seen/worked on.

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