Ideas and suggestion bot (robotical ssilk)

[jorgenRe]

Why?
So during the long time ive been using this forum it have come to my mind that alot of people dont read the rules before creating threads this results into the server being filled with unneeded threads. So since it is a terms of conditition they HAVE accepted during the creation of their account to obey the rules.

And this forum is getting more and more used by much more people.

Possible Soloution
Therefore what we need is a robotic ssilk so he have to work less

How
I(or any other volanteer with experience) may if adviced and allowed look into creating a bot that reads through the ideas and suggestion part and then posts links to similar suggestions (if possible ofcourse) Please share your thougts on this
PS thanks for all Your work done on this forum Ssilk!

[DaveMcW]

Maybe if we had a search engine that didn't suck, people could find similar suggestions more easily.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=3792

[Khyron]

The topic made me but this subject is sort of on a topic I've been thinking about for this forum..

Pushing forum search and trying to control 'new topic spam' is like pushing shit up hill. It runs counter to human behaviour, and the behaviour has been reinforced on other (poorly managed) forums. Forum search is notoriously bad and sometimes completely disabled. In other words, the people causing the problem (posting before searching) would not bother to find out if searching is even worthwhile.

The next step forum admins usually take is to add more rules. And that of course has negligible impact because the majority of people have decided to post their idea before they've even created an account. Reading terms and conditions is just a barrier to their goal. Creating more rules there just increases the likelihood of someone skipping to the 'I Agree' button. We can attribute some blame for this behavior on excessively long EULAs...

Above all this we have the problem that the majority of people who post new ideas for a game have no concept of what development work it would require, what priority their idea would be given, what impact it would have on game balance, what reward it would bring to the play experience, what direction that would take the game in, etc.

And there's also a trend where these problems become more pronounced the bigger (more mainstream) a community gets.

So my recommendation would be to keep the Ideas & Suggestions area. You leave it as a place for people to vent their ideas, good or bad. It helps create the illusion of community involvement. Unfortunately the value of that subforum to developers tends to diminish as it becomes unmanaged. The forum sort of becomes a Darwinist utopia where the fittest ideas and suggestions survive. Unfortunately we humans are more likely to respond in disagreement or on controversial issues than something we agree with.

One of the most common and effective ways to capture the good ideas is for a forum regular/mod to maintain a stickied post which indexes the recurring/good (read: worthy) ideas.

[ssilk]

Robotical ssilk

Well give me a day of really free time and I would add the mod mentioned by FreeER

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... pbb#p25931

I would then also built in a check for the wiki (or some wiki pages) and a check for existing mods.

Ok, seriously: The whole theme should be seen in a common sense:

- There is a promised bug-tracking system
- There is the need to add some special plugins to phpbb and mediawiki
- I see also the need to modify the server so, that it uses virtual hosts instead of one big host and some subdirectories
- It would be cool to have one usermanagement for the most tasks in the game-, forum-, wiki- and bug-tracking software, instead of a usermanagement, which needs to create accounts for every service extra.

So, I would like to hear, what Kovarex means - cause he owns these systems...

[jorgenRe]

- There is the need to add some special plugins to phpbb

Thats true.

[jorgenRe]

One of the most common and effective ways to capture the good ideas is for a forum regular/mod to maintain a stickied post which indexes the recurring/good (read: worthy) ideas.

Hmmm a good manual idea i guess
I see they do it on some forums so i guess it could be done here.

[ssilk]

The question is: what is read worthy?

I don't wanna decide that: I influence the whole development-process big enough yet. more gives me too much power in my hands.

It makes sense, that the devs say: yeah, we like that, it's worth to think more into that direction. Yes. But I don't want anybody else to decide that.

More about it: http://www.implementingscrum.com/2006/0 ... d-chicken/

I'm just a chicken.

[Khyron]

Yeah, I see your point. However I would be inclined to trust your judgement, ssilk. There's also the fact that such an index would be a compendium, not a replacement for the ideas & suggestions forum. Nothing to stop the developers doing what they already do and trawling through all the posts to get an understanding of what the community is banging on about. So the only quesiton to ask is "does providing such a list give a benefit that justifies the effort in maintaining it?".

That said, I will explain how I would approach this as a generalised process in order to minimise the amount of judgement calls (and work) you need to make:

• If you feel the need to respond to someone's post with something like "This idea was already discussed <link>", it probably belongs in the index.
• If the idea is generally endorsed by the community (eg: a few "+1 great idea" responses), it probably belongs in the index.
• Some threads start out confusing and there's a fair bit of discussion before the idea is purified down to a simple statement. For those threads, wait and see how it pans out. It should eventually sound like a consensus is reached that the idea is good or that it's flawed.
• Keep in mind the scope of the idea. Is it a trivial feature request that will probably happen in due course? Then don't bother indexing it. Is the idea a very, very long term goal? Then don't bother indexing it. Is it something that you think has a chance to be implemented within 6 months? Probably worth indexing then. Stuff like bridges and flooring which keeps coming up is what belongs on the index.
• Beware of putting too many things on the index. It might even be worth limiting it to the 'top 20' ideas. If there are too many ideas, the usefulness of such an index is diminished.
• Don't sit down in one session and create a monolithic post with all the ideas in one go. Treat it as a living document. Add the ideas as you happen to read them.

You could also just try it for a little while and see how it goes. Nothing stopping you from deciding at a later stage that it's not working out.

[Khyron]

Hmmm a good manual idea i guess
I see they do it on some forums so i guess it could be done here.

Sometimes people try to implement a technical solution to what is a social problem.

[ssilk]

Simple answered to Khyron:



Someone cannot be a chicken and pig at the same time/in one person. It will fail.
See here: http://www.implementingscrum.com/2006/1 ... d-chicken/

In other words: you want me to be in the role of a "product owner". But I cannot nearly fulfill that role cause it is someone, which sits in - our case - between the forum members and the devs. And it is a full-time job. See for example this post:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4692
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4682

I tried there a very little bit to make the job of the PO. You don't want to know how much time it takes to make such big suggestions. It is a full time job.

Currently It is a task of the devs to choose the right suggestions. If they want to change it, they need just to change it. Not we (the forum members).

[DerivePi]

Perhaps a democratic option could be instituted. Give us the ability to up or down vote posts. Down voted posts disappear to the last pages of the forum topic and up voted posts rise to the top. New topics stay in order for 1 week.

Instead of posts being ignored for not following the rules, out of order posts are relegated to the back of the line.

[ssilk]

Hm. Not that I'm against democracy, but for a game-development democracy is really bad.

I trust the devs in a way, that they have a look about what's wanted/needed and make a task for their backlog out of it...

[Khyron]

@ssilk
Ech, you're really entrenching yourself in a set of management ideas there... Obviously it's not worth trying to convince you to maintain a sticked post, so I won't. I would respect that even if you simply said "I'm not paid to do that". I agree with and acknowledge the complications in one person fulfilling two roles with conflicting agendas. What I'm worried about is that you've got a hammer and now everything looks like a nail. The hammer in question is some Scrum principles.

Concurrently, obviously a stickied post maintaining an index to the popular ideas is a common and adequately successful solution to this problem on many other forums.

Refusing to accept an imperfect solution is 'correct' when there is a better solution. So I'll wait and see if any other ideas come up or some of the other ideas that have already been mentioned in this thread are implemented. In the meantime I guess you'll continue to merge idea threads and tell people to use the search tool etc.

[ssilk]

Hm. Eventually I overreacted a bit. I excuse. I think the reason for this is, that I don't liked the thought to mange that alone, as always.

And ok, I will help maintaining such a page, if enough people (>4 with me) say "ok, I will bring me in, for example with links to some special theme. Splitter, belts extensions and other belt dependend ideas.". I'm not so clear about the form, but I think anybody can just begin and the rest will find...

I see that as an experiment and the worst thing that can happen is, that we find out, it isn't that useful.

[cube]

Well, for me (and the rest of devs too, i guess) it would be nice to have an aggregation post, or a wiki page or something, but I completely understand if ssilk doesn't feel like doing it (because I don't too ). What if we move the responsibility more to the people by making this a wiki page? It would contain a list of ideas, just a title, one sentence description and a link to forum thread. The only problem is how to force some meaningful ordering to the page.

[Khyron]

Alright, since I was the bigmouth who suggested it, I'll get it started. One of the main goals is to prevent or reduce the number of duplicate idea threads. So I'll start with a forum thread since that's in the same domain.

[jorgenRe]

Alright, since I was the bigmouth who suggested it, I'll get it started. One of the main goals is to prevent or reduce the number of duplicate idea threads. So I'll start with a forum thread since that's in the same domain.

If you need help im open to help you with it

[Khyron]

If you need help im open to help you with it

Fantastic! I welcome any help you'd prepare to offer. How you could help is by choosing a topic that you think belongs in the thread, then find any links of relevance and I'll include them in the main post. Then I'll take those links and some consistency, structure & formatting.

Same applies for anybody else who's interested in helping!