Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25101690-20160208183149/@comment-25012056-20160208231548

AlteOgre wrote: Sinthorion wrote: ... And finally, AlteOgre suggested to rename the Suggestions to "Proposals". Please discuss this too. The notion of using templates is to increase the quality level of the average suggestion. While doing that, a renaming to 'proposal' would be appropriate. Without any change of front-end gatekeeping and raising the bar for entries, any entry will simply remain a suggestion.

I am dissappointed with the above plan, as it fails to: For Mevans: Identify improvement options of existing features and identify additional features to improve the mod. These must prove valuable for the intended gameplay the mod offers to the community, have acceptable difficulty to code and are fun and meaningful to work on. For the community: Provide a platform where Wikia Contributors can post their improvement ideas, for both existing and additional features. For Mevans and the community: A clear overview of traceable improvement proposals, along with the planned features, categorized, presented in an orderly manner and updated on a regular basis by a small team that can be held accountable for the overview. For the community: A clear and straightforward procedure and platform to post improvement proposals and have them reviewed by other contributors and responsible and accountable review teams. This may all sound harsh, but realize my criticism on the existing system was pretty harsh to start with. Now that we have the chance to significantly improve on this process, I propose we seriously use this opportunity and mould it to how it would serve Mevans and the community best.
 * Address and identify the purpose of this process. In my opinion this all boils down to these objectives:
 * Deliver a meaningful overview of okayed improvement proposals for both existing and new features, for both Mevans and the community, especially those Users who would wish to provide meaningful new improvement proposals. In my view, this would require:
 * Reduce the inflow of superfluous, redundant and low-quality entries by raising the bar for new entries.
 * Reduce the waste of efforts on superfluous, redundant and low-quality entries by the community in verifying the usefulness of new entries.
 * Raise the treshold for new entries by: 1) requiring a template for posting a new entry, ensuring the entry is a serious proposal worth looking into, and 2) disallowing non-registered users to post new entries.
 * Distinguish between improvement proposals for existing features and improvement proposals regarding new features. This is debatable for sure, but I believe it is more meaningful to distinguish between these categories than not to. It will be an arbitrary process to determine what type of improvement proposals can be considered 'based on existing features' or not, but I expect it to pay off, both for Mevans and improvement-minded users. The effort one has to put in a proposal to improve on existing features and the effort for Mevans to improve on existing features, is typically lower.
 * Improve the selection process by not just looking at kudo's (the # of kudo's is strongly dependent on entry timing and quality: time of day and week an entry is posted can be of significant impact, high quality entries can often get less attention than low quality entries as users feel less inclined to provide criticism to well prepared proposals), but also ensure a team of champions (selected staff + contributors) on the feature category, is assigned to judge the quality of an entry before it's deemed 'approved/okay'.
 * Improve on the way 'approved/okayed' entries are presented / archived by categorizing entries and compiling the improvement proposals into summarized, listed info that is useful for both Mevans and the community.

A teaser question: Will you guys reveal all relevant suggestion threads that were so bluntly 'deleted' (= removed from view) at last 'cleanout'? Or do you expect all posters to identify them and request for a repost of those threads (typically posted since november 2015 - january 2016)? I have the power to simply re-post all my 6 suggestions that were deleted, but not all have this priviledge. ;) 1. The purpose of the process is to keep suggestions off wiki pages, give any and all users a place to post and critique ideas, and for Mevans to look through when he needs or wants ideas. This is Mevans's mod, after all, not the community's.

2. This is as good of an acceptance system as you can really get, without getting overly complicated for something so superficial.

3. Well, that's what the Discussions Moderators are for: to get rid of crappy threads.

4. Most suggestions aren't all that useful anyway.

5. That often means the suggestion would contain redundant text, and that not all users can post, which is the POINT of having a suggestions forum on the wiki. (Or one of them)

6. That's why I created the Feedback board....

7. Again, that's what mods are for.

8. Categorization would require multiple forums, which is not only a waste of space, but also further detracts from the point of this wiki: to inform visitors about what this mod has to offer.

Your original plan came under a ton of flak in the wiki administration chat, and this is the closest plan to it that we could get to happen.

Gen. Grievous1138 (admin) comlink 23:15, February 8, 2016 (UTC)