Feature voting

[Silver]

@den

Any official response from developers?
Otherwise discussion is pretty useless.

@WhiteNoise’s (Feature voting) and @ryanjamurphy’s response (Feature voting) pretty much summarized how we feel about this.

To reiterate, the data available on the forum right now is already useful in our prioritization, and I don’t see how an ordered list by exact number of votes would be more helpful. In our opinion, making a product is not simply churning out feature after another based on popularity. It’s way more nuanced than that.

Therefore, maintaining yet another system of voted issue tracker is not something we’ll invest into, on top of our forum and Discord server, both in terms of time and cost (solutions like UserVoice can cost $499/month or more).

Thanks for all the interest in helping Obsidian create a more organized list of feature requests! Really appreciate it.

[Silver]

@Cito

If that would be the only measure, we would end up with another mass market product like OneNote or Evernote instead of an innovative, powerful tool for knowledge workers.

I totally agree! There will be popular feature requests that do not align with Obsidian’s direction, and when those pile up, it would seem that the voting system is useless (“why haven’t the top 3 voted features been implemented?!”).

@Cito

And I just noticed that merging forum posts is actually possible and already practiced here. So after all, maybe the forum is in fact sufficient. More important is that the forum/list is curated and maintained by somebody.

Great point, our amazing moderators are already doing that, and in addition to development we also try to spend time looking at the feature requests and merge them as needed.

[Silver]

@sdc

Oh haha I was just dumping thoughts (probably should be putting this in obsidian …) sort of along the ideas of “feature requests are solutions to potentially the wrong problems” but yeah something like

1. what are you trying to do (and why) 2. what are you doing now and why is it annoying 3. what would you propose instead

Good point, reminds me of a post we did for Dynalist, “How to write good feature requests”:

How to write good feature requests

Unfortunately, like with the help docs, few people actually go through the trouble to read it, so our Dynalist forum is still full of feature requests that tell us exactly what to do without explaining their use cases. We had to ask what their use cases are.

[Klaas]

@Silver

Unfortunately, like with the help docs, few people actually go through the trouble to read it, so our Dynalist forum is still full of feature requests that tell us exactly what to do without explaining their use cases.

Is that also the case with Obsidian?

[Silver]

@Klaas

Is that also the case with Obsidian?

I think it’s true in general. At least from the observation that not many people on our Discord read the #faq channel or the help docs before asking.

It’s understandable, and I don’t think we can ever fix the issue of people not reading stuff. Just saying we can post such a guide in the feature request template and also post it on the forum, but I don’t expect having it there would eliminate duplicate requests or make all feature requests conform to it. It’s probably still worth it to customize that post for Obsidian and cross post it here though.

[sdc]

Need to start implementing quizzes haha

I think I saw something where you couldn’t see any channels except the faq and then you had to hit like the emoji things under the faq for each channel to appear.