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Mr. C

User Profile Image Mr. C
Member since : Jun-03-2009 (Verified)
17 Ideas, 34 Comments, 58 Votes
How do you envision using IdeaScale primarily?

User Activity Stream

Ideas Posted

A link to the actual Idea for which a notification is being sent should be the first hyperlink in every notification email message.

At present, new Ideas requiring Approval do not include such a link. I find myself accidentally Approving Ideas when what I though I was doing is opening the Idea (for example, to establish Tracking for myself).

Make the first link always do the same thing.
As a moderator, I would like to track the comments made on all Ideas. A setting that permits me to opt *out* of tracking on a case-by-case basis rather than requiring opt *in* on each new Idea would permit this.

This also might be a desirable option for general users, but I can see how the email volume could be extreme in the case of large, highly-active communities. Perhaps it would be a configurable setting whether to enable this feature for general users.
Revising an Idea needs to include the ability to modify the Title/Subject as well as the summary text.
If I perform an Idea search that returns multiple Ideas and select one to view the details, I cannot use the [Back] button to return to the list of found ideas to investigate another. It generates a page timeout error.

That's the most-likely operation to perform following a search.

Two ideas:

1) Allow [Back] to work
2) Return search list of Ideas with the full interface of Idea, Summary, and expandable Comments, as well ad the drill-down feature.
When the Moderator Comments are entered or updated, this information is not broadcast to users who are tracking the Idea. The same is true when the Idea summary is edited or when existing comments are modified by a moderator.

I believe updates and revisions made by users should be broadcast automatically just as new Comments are.

I also believe that it must be possible to broadcast changes made by Moderators. This is particularly important for Moderator Comments, but important in all areas.

One way to support this would be to include two options for saving Edits: [Save Changes] and [Save Changes And Broadcast]

Minor edits for things like spelling could then be made by Moderators without pestering users. Major edits of important feedback could be communicated to the interested users.
Moderator Comments
Interesting. We are scheduled to review this functionality next month. We'll run this through and see if we have further questions for you guys.
I would like to see an "Active" category added to the section with Top Rated, Recent, Review, etc.

The list would be sorted, descending, by the date of the most recent change made to the Idea (new Comments, modification description, Status, or Moderator Comments, etc.)
We've noticed a decided downturn in feedback from your development staff.

One down side of Idea Management is that it highlights when discussions and feedback diminish or stop. Having made a transition from evaluation to production use of IdeaScale, we need a sense of where your development is headed and when we might have resolutions for open issues, especially bugs and broken features.

Have you considered providing an ongoing list of the work you are presently implementing?
We have noticed that the item counts in various places do not immediately respond when the underlying data changes. For example, the Category counts do not immediately respond to show new Ideas that have been created.

It becomes misleading when these counts get out of sync with reality. It makes it appear that an item was not handled properly, and decreases confidence that the system is tracking things accurately.

Where counts are provided, they need to be accurate at all times.
We would like to be able to alter the default sort order of Ideas.

For example, a Custom Field could indicate a Rank... We would then like to be able to sort results in ascending or descending order, by Rank.
Removing a Tag from an Idea, or deleting the only Idea that has a particular Tag both leave those Tags in the Tag Cloud.

The Idea which has had a Tag removed continues to be returned when the Tag is selected. The Tag that once existed on a deleted Idea returns an empty list.
The Related Topics/Ideas section of one of our IdeaScale sites sre showing multiple duplicates of individual Ideas.

Could this be because this is a new site and there are not a large number of ideas in the system yet?
When changes are made to the user Profile and the Password fields are left blank, the following informational dialog is displayed:

Passwords do not match. No password update made.
[Continue]

This message must be dismissed by the user.

If neither Password nor Password (Confirm) have been specified, I would consider this to be working as designed. The status message is not necessary. If feedback is to be provided, I would think it to be more relevant when the password *is* changed.
I regularly receive two copies of many notification emails coming from IdeaScale communities. One is flagged by our email system as spam.
I note that ideas graduated from questionpro.ideascale.com to this community are coming in with no votes, and administrative user accounts associated with the historical idea and comments.

It's better than hand-entering text, but that history is too significant to discard, in my opinion. I would like to see such graduations carry their entire history, as well as pre-authorizing user profiles for all users of the prior community to which that history refers (the authors, commentors, etc.)

If an account for the same email address already exists, that's great. If not, seed it with the values from the prior community and include this fact in the email notice of the graduation.
The email updates I received that Ideas had been graduated to this community (from questionpro.ideascale.com) have broken hyperlinks.

Example:
Topic/Idea: Allow custom fields on an idea that could be visible or hidden

Comment:
This idea has graduated to the IdeaScale Feedback panel (Idea #251)

Posted By : Site Administrator
http://ideas.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/13774-3339

This hyperlink produces the following result:

Invalid Link
The link you have clicked is invalid. There could be multiple reasons for this :
Make sure you copy/paste the entire url
The sender of the email message has cancelled his account

There is also no mention of the need to create a new login for this community. Ideally, a migration of like this would be transparent, with an account for the person receiving the notification populated from the community from which the Idea had been graduated.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 86 Ideas

Comments Posted

Mr. C 18 days ago
The hole in our ability to evaluate the voting patterns in our community is growing over time. Is there no way that this information can be provided? How about a downloadable report if the user interface cannot be quickly enhanced to show these details?
Mr. C 2 months ago
What is this nonsense?
Mr. C 2 months ago
So, our customers are catching on to the loophole that they can stack the deck in their favor by signing up multiple participants and assigning all of their votes to a single idea.

While this is within the letter of the law, it's not within the spirit of the law, and we need to take steps to limit the influence of any one firm.

Our code of conduct requires participants to identify their organization, so we have a good idea when this starts to happen, but neither we nor any other participant can presently get to the voting details to prove that a high vote count comes from a small number of participants from a single entity.

We have intentionally limited our influence to two participants in your forum. If we had multiple votes to spend here, we would put many of them on this one.

Any chance of a Christmas present here?
Mr. C 3 months ago
Now, now, don't get teste.
Mr. C 3 months ago
Nyuck. Nyuck.
Mr. C 3 months ago
I believe this is a duplicate of Idea #241 "Allow the ability to change or rescind a vote". This Idea already has 9 votes, so please vote for it there if you support this idea.
Mr. C 3 months ago
Internet Explorer 7. Back button webpage expiration failure attached.

Note: I had to use Firefox to post this comment, as multiple attempts to post it from IE 7 failed with continuous status bar when attempting to post the comment.
Mr. C 3 months ago
Note that [Back] exists within the Title of this Idea, but is not being displayed. Clearly it was interpreted as HTML rather than content. So long as HTML is not accepted in this interface, these characters should be converted to their HTML hard-coded characters rather than producing error messages or suppressed output.
Mr. C 3 months ago
Is there some kind of a report that can put this information in a CSV or Excel file? We're seeing the activity we hoped for, but we can't get at the details...
Mr. C 4 months ago
I would include Moderator Comments and any other text elements of an Idea that are visible to an end-user.
Mr. C 4 months ago
I second this thought. If an Idea becomes Completed, I believe it needs to freeze the vote counts and continue to indicate who had voted for it before it was Completed. New votes should be disallowed, and the votes available to the voters need to be added back to their pool of votes.

The behavior if an Idea is moved back out of Completed status would be somewhat problematic. On one hand, you want the prior support for the idea to remain intact. On the other hand, people may have already re-allocated their votes. Some kind of Phantom Votes, like the record in the Completed Idea, might be the solution. If the user comes back to vote on the new idea, their Phantom votes would be removed and their new vote allocation would take over.
Mr. C 4 months ago
Without this feedback, we also cannot tell if 20 people voted for an idea, or one person allocated 20 votes to the idea. Both cases are significant, but differ in meaning.

Our participants are already asking to be able to see this information, too.
Mr. C 4 months ago
Rather than set a cost for the idea, it might be possible to set a "Total Cost" threshold of votes that would be required to move forward with an idea. Group consensus and collective support would then determine whether there is enough support to warrant implementing the idea.

A simple idea might need 5 votes to have consider building it. A very expensive idea might require 500 votes before it would be considered for implementation. At the time you see the threshold, you could choose to apply more of your remaining votes to help reach that threshhold.
Mr. C 4 months ago
We definitely need to be able to see who has voted for what when the Poker-style voting is in effect. It's important to us to be able to tell who has voted, and how many of their votes they have spent on that idea.

The Users Activity with a vote total would handle this nicely:

Example:
Mr. C (4)
Stew (1)
tysonlowery (20)

Total votes gets our attention, but some votes are more equal than others... We really need access to who is doing the voting.
Mr. C 4 months ago
I like that idea of different costs for features that are expensive to build. If it could be implemented in a clever way, it could be an excellent way to communicate those complexities back to the user community so they can make hard choices with their votes.

One complication I see is that users can create their new ideas and immediately vote on them. At what point would the "cost" be added to the idea, and how would that affect votes that have already been cast?
Mr. C 5 months ago
This community was created within the last two weeks.

I noticed this after finding two items with the same Idea number. I did not notice it at the time I was entering the new Ideas. The most-recent idea numbers are unique, but they have all been created in the last two weeks.

I added quite a few Ideas in rapid succession. Some of them immediately went into Under Review status. Perhaps the number got reused for the next new issue?
Mr. C 5 months ago
Please delete that URL once you've noted it.

Thank you.
Mr. C 5 months ago
Here's hoping the recent lull is a prelude to a major set of new features...

We still need to be able to change custom field values.
Mr. C 6 months ago
We are very eagerly awaiting the ability to modify Custom Fields. We would like to use IdeaScale as a private communication channel between the various participants, including Development, Consulting, and Support. The comment history of who said what, when, would allow us to ensure that the details don't get lost in email chains to various people.

Since our use would include status information and issue parameters, non-Editable Custom Fields prevent us from using IdeaScale as a collaborative issue management conversation record.
Mr. C 7 months ago
I don't believe so. We had to re-create our account when the IdeaScale Ideas were separated from the QuestionPro Ideas. I can't imagine having done that twice.

Both notifications are coming to the same Email address, so I suppose you could examine your user list to confirm this.
Mr. C 7 months ago
Couldn't agree more. Will be very powerful, not ready for prime-time yet.
Mr. C 8 months ago
I think this could be a great idea. I also think that there might be cases where the Target Date is private to the Moderators, and not exposed to the Customers...

In some scenarios, you wouldn't want to get put on the hook for not delivering something that had to be cut out of the planned release due to resource limitations...

But the field would still be very useful internally in that case.
Mr. C 8 months ago
I'd say, given your point about available resources, perhaps making your general-purpose features rock solid would be bigger bang-for-the-buck than such a specialized concept (without the workflow it implies).

I think the initial "Costing Model" idea above, in its simplest form, is just a good implementation of Custom Fields that can be edited over time.

The Moderator would be required to manually ensure that the value of their Implementation Cost or Benefit custom fields actually had meaning or integrity.

For IdeaScale to help in workflow, an option to restrict editing of particular Custom Fields (Moderators only at a minimum) could be enough to give a process some integrity that end-users cannot mess up with indiscriminate updates. An audit trail of the changes to the Custom Fields would also be very important.
Mr. C 8 months ago
Dynamic HTML Tags / Template
{IDEASCALE_SEARCH}

http://www.ideascale.com/help/535-window.html
Mr. C 8 months ago
The ability to change custom field values, make calculations and decisions based upon them, and limit the scope of who can view or edit them would be key to the usefulness of metrics like this.

I'm in favor of the concept if it includes the implied workflow and decision-making capabilities that would make use of the data value.
Mr. C 8 months ago
It turns out that this feature already exists.

You can add a search field to your existing IdeaScale community. Check the documentation for how.

The search field is not exposed in *this* community at this moment because the Search function is in the process of being added to the standard header for all communities.
Mr. C 9 months ago
The migration problem really does need to be addressed. An administrative ability to migrate ideas from their originating community to a new one without loss of content or audit trail will be very important as your customers learn from initial attempts and consider the need to develop second-generation sites with a controlled release to production.
Mr. C 9 months ago
The highlights could be in the heading for the category, and/or as mouseover popup for the Category count.
Mr. C 9 months ago
I think multiple numbers would be confusing to viewers. I suggest making the number indicate the total number of ideas within the category, regardless of state.

I also think it would be great to highlight those ideas that have progressed in some way.

For example:

35 Ideas
2 Under Review
3 In Progress
1 Completed

Zero values would be suppressed. I think it would be counter-productive to reinforce the notion of inactivity.
example: 0 Active of 100
Mr. C 9 months ago
The counts that appear with the Categories seem only to indicate Active ideas. That means that the more-important Under Review, In Process, and Completed ideas sort of drop off the map.

I'd like these counts to update immediately to reflect the status changes and new entries, and for the count to indicate the total number of ideas (in any state) within the category.

For bonus points, mouseover popup might break it down by status. For example:

35 Ideas
2 Under Review
3 In Progress
1 Completed
Mr. C 9 months ago
If it streamlines the end-user ability to customize the look and feel of the IdeaScale community or improves the control we have, I'd be in favor.

I'm interested in other perspectives. I'll watch this topic and reserve my vote until I hear from others who can comment on the specific technology involved.
Mr. C 9 months ago
I'm in favor of this concept so long as the ability to change the vote at a later date is introduced to the product.
Mr. C 9 months ago
A suggestion tudinh. Your goal is to gain votes for your ideas so they will become higher-priority in the development plan.

Consider providing detail or a link to a best practice reference for what you would consider to be the better solution and construct your idea in a positive tone without biting the hand that might feed you.

I can't even evaluate your suggestion because I lack the specific HTML experience that might give me some idea of the "better ways" you mention.