Suggestion: Sort Ideas and Suggestions

[ickputzdirwech]

I know that this would be a huge task since the "Ideas and Suggestions" subforum contains nearly 8000 topics, but I noticed that there are a lot of topics which could be considered as implemented or outdated. Also it would make searching much easier if post were sorted in subforums like bots, blueprints, trains, combat etc

[Bilka]

I go through them to move implemented ones sometimes, but usually I don't find that many that are 100% implemented. Usually the problem is that the first post is implemented, but then there is further discussion about features that are far from implemented, so moving the entire thread to implemented is wrong for 90% of it.

[DaveMcW]

If the first post is implemented, just move it to implemented and people can repost any suggestions in the replies.

[Koub]

@ickputzdirwech : From my experience, subcategorizing in a tree-like structure is always a bad idea when the reason why it's set up is "there is too much data at the same place".

The reason is that the more you have precise categories, the more likely a suggestion will have to be stored into 2 or more places at the same time (example : bots subforum, belt subforum, and try to sort a bots vs belts suggestion).

And on the opposite spectrum of the scope, too vague categories will not be explicit to users, and people would have to search in several of them to find a potential previous suggestion.

The only answer I have found to the "too much data to find things" is "need a better search engine" and/or "have a tag system", knowing that a tag system needs real investment in time to tag appropriately every single suggestion or contribution to be "findable" with tag searches.

[mmmPI]

The only answer I have found to the "too much data to find things" is "need a better search engine" and/or "have a tag system", knowing that a tag system needs real investment in time to tag appropriately every single suggestion or contribution to be "findable" with tag searches.

Is there a way to aggregate the new posts automatically and receive them as a random person like you can do with RSS ?

I have done a thing at school quite some time ago now, to spare me some time reading press.It was 3 different pieces of scripts i hacked together.First using RSS parser like Magpie(gpl license), to gather the news article/new posts text in my computer.

Then I used a part of a javascript library https://d3js.org/ (bsd license) to make a bubble chart based on string occurences. It would show many bubble each being a word and bigger the more the word was used. I could click the bubble with a word and it would link me to the list of article containing the word in an RSS reader from where i could launch the webbrowser and deal with the ads and cookies if it was really needed. I could also swich it to make each bubble a particular RSS feed with color for the title of press, and the size, the number of article.

You could imagine it as a mix of those example of use case for the javascript library DDD ( data driven document).
https://observablehq.com/@d3/bubble-chart http://codementum.org/exoplanets/

I had to use a lexicon, (3rd piece of code i got for free and open but it wasn't english ) to remind me of the list of word that are not important ( the of at do it .... ) so that it would show at some point very useful information easily , name of countries, region , cities, companies , politician, disasters, , also stuff like elections, date and time and words that are only used a lot in the press and very few in real life, that makes you click on it to know why would they talk about that; it surprinsigly easy to cut down the "useless string" number, since it was the biggest bubble at first.

I used php, javascript, and html/ css, while not really knowing what i was doing, there are a lot ef example too make it easier to use the DDD library. It was very badly optimised, i requested the whole process to be done once of twice a day and it took like 2min30sec to display the chart for the first time, making the calculations for the bubbles and writing the file. Navigating after the file were created was decently fast for more text data than what is sent daily on the forum i think. I had started looking at AJAX things, but that was too much time investement to learn for the use. ( I wanted it web based)

The search engine helps you find when you know what you are looking for already in a way, and the tag system doesn't really have to be smart or tedious or precise, since with enough data/post, you could identify the main meaningful words automatically ! it was a very useful tool for me to answer question on the news, knowing what would be the topics in advance i only had to read one or two long and non-biaised article on each topic, rather than dealing with all the junk to figure out what was the new thing at the moment.

Context, like "this is a question/stuff i show" , "this is adressed to everyone/mainly to the devs/modders", "this is a suggestion" are the things that are difficult to get with only string occurences but that is also how the forum is atm organised so that posts are already organised to spare the smart work hard to teach the machine ! At least for the second point of OP, between belts or bots, belt and bots, train, combat, blueprint and train and so on.

For the implemented/outdated , 53.5% implemented, that kind of thing is different. For very long discussion and if you were to be VERY precise about it , you could watch a bubble chart in motion, where bubble would represent the occurences of string in the last 5/ 10 / 20 post, and would grow or reduce so that you would have a representation of the topic discussed over time, and you would notice the change of topic/ new elements. But that still wouldn't fix the problem to know if it's relevant or not for anyone

[Koub]

TBH, this goes light years beyond my scope as a simple moderator. Also, despite I'm a former developper and I understand what you describe, what you're talking of is way out of my league, so I can't comment the do-ability.

The only thing I can do is do my best to keep the new suggestions as tidy as possible, and aggregate them to older ones when relevant, but I have a full time job (way too much full time actually, but better have too much work than none ), and the little moderation I can produce takes me in the 2-3 hours a day (when we're not just post-major update) including week ends.

That's the reason why I don't often move suggestions to "implemented" : the lack of time to get through suggestion every time a single one is implemented (also because when the devs implement something, there is seldom a link to the original suggestion or even the mention that they were inspired by a suggestion).

What I'd also like would be that when the devs know they don't want something, state it explicitly on the suggestion and move it to "won't implement". It would help me keep new suggestions tidy on subjects that keep coming back forever (new belt types, 3 lane belts, faster belts, 2 way belts, 1 lane belt blocker, ... and same diversity with inserter types). A dev documented source of "the things that one shouldn't even bother asking for" could also help.

[Jap2.0]

I agree that some form of organization would be nice, although what I'm not sure. Sorting isn't really feasible (due to reasons mentioned by Koub). Tagging would be an enormous project and not much better than search (which is basically what tagging automatically would be) - and search typically isn't awful, if you know what to search for. I think the "frequently suggested/link collections" could be (and is) useful, but maintaining that's still a huge task. Having some way to have members of the community (because Koub &co are probably overworked enough already, cleaning up after all of us) curate/maintain it would be an interesting idea (I see several people regularly posting a list of links to related threads in ideas and suggestions), but I don't really see how that would be feasible with phpBB (actually it might... but not easily).

Bilka: I'd say that unless there was a general agreement that an alternate idea proposed in the discussion was better, move it to implemented if the original idea was implemented. The resulting discussion is valuable, but it's just that: discussion. If needed it can be linked to or (I think? No idea how mod tools work) split from the other thread, or just another redundant thread made. Furthermore, just because it's in the implemented subforum doesn't mean the discussion has to stop; at minimum everyone who's commented and regularly checks the "your posts" tab would stay in on the discussion (and probably more). I'd say that in some cases that almost falls under the category of "why we only want one suggestion per post" as well.

[ickputzdirwech]

I think topics should be moved into implemented even if replies contain alternative or further suggestions. If they are still wanted people should post them as new topics.

Is there anyway people could help you mods with organizing the subforum? Would it be helpful if people would post replies saying "move to implemented" etc? If more people would work on it, it wouldn't be that much work.

[MakeItGraphic]

A bit off topic but there are a few subforums on here that are rather neglected imo. This one for example has 327 pages of post that could be merged, and or sorted into one of the other subforums of this subforum. It's bothered me too ickputzdirwech. But your efforts are appreciated, I was hoping maybe they could have a mod liaison with devs to help sort some of the subforums, or promote other users to mod status to do research based janitoring of subjects.

[ssilk]

You are right. It’s just not manageable for a single person (or even two) to keep a neutral overview of the 8175 threads plus sub forums. And in the flow of the discussions there are also sometimes interesting ideas. To read everything takes just too much time.

But of course if someone points us that thread is implemented or obsolete or whatever he is welcome. If time goes on we can talk about more rights.

And I will take a deeper look into the Frequently suggested Subboard where this thread was moved from, because there is indeed a mess of very old suggestions mixed with new. My fail.

[Bilka]

I've been having some fun occasionally traveling through the main ideas and suggestion forum and moving implemented things. It's fun because sometimes I cannot believe that some features weren't added together with other features, like seeing modules in alt-view was apparently added *after* modules: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=3674. How did you play without that?!

But I think that over 8k topics are a lot and will take a long time to go through to find implemented topics + move them, so long that I don't think we will ever be done. And you keep making more topics

[ickputzdirwech]

I am happy my help is appreciated. I'm a bit hesitant to flood the main Ideas and Suggestions bord with comments saying: "move to implemented", "merge with post ..." I therefore would suggest a sticky topic were people can post links to topics that should be merged or moved.

Another thing that bugs me is that people still make posts with multiple and completely different ideas. And a few posts lack any comprehensibility (fancy word). Since English is not my first language the later might in some cases just be my fault and I sometimes have trouble expressing my self as well. For these kind of posts I would suggest a new subforum. Posts that don't meet the criteria are moved there with a kind message that they should make a new topic (or multiple) following the rules.


Since it is very well off topic maybe we should discuss it further over here: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=73634

[Bilka]

I moved some posts from 30575 where they were a bit offtopic into here where they are completely on topic. I hope that is not too confusing.

@ickputzdirwech one way to mark topics that should be moved is to report them and put info into the "further info" field. Though I am not sure how that will be received when you report-to-move 50 topics, instead of 5 (all a question of scale :P).

[Koub]

I can only speak for myself, but a reported topic, a bump with "this has been implemented", of a link to a previous similar suggestion are always welcome : I spend a couple hours everyday do to my moderator stuff on the new posts, but managing all the content of the forum, including the whole Ideas and Suggestions subforum, especially the topics that have been implemented or deemed outdated would be a full time job, and I already have one (way too much time consuming on top of that).