[SUGGESTION] Suggestion: Abolish Suggestion Box

Hi folks... Yes, I do mean to literally remove the suggestion box.

Generally, we do not have any lack of ideas, we lack the time and resources to implement/fulfill them. We need contributors, not empty suggestions. Going through the suggestion box, I see that at least 90% of the posts are ideas we either already want or already don't want, and I find that this thread category is almost entirely useless to most of us developers.

If we're working on something and want other ideas for it, we'll post another thread for it. I do this all the time with my gameplay discussions or whathaveyou, although generally most of the time that's rather to help with deciding which feature to go with... not ideas for features in the first place. It's not hard to come up with good ideas, it's hard to invest the time and effort into realizing them. That is why i'm tired of seeing/hearing empty suggestions from people who have no interest in actually helping to realize them. Our time is already stretched out thin enough, we have more ideas than we can possibly ever complete, and I don't think it is useful to have a suggestion box when people post their ideas and just leave it at that. Personally, I do not even read this forum section for this reason.

tl;dr: Do it yourself, or stop complaining. Stop suggesting things, pick up a development environment and help us out. http://dev.xonotic.org/

In short, we're not id software, but rather a group of 5-10 developers with varying time constraints, interests, and expertise. We lack in a lot of areas, but we certainly don't lack feedback. We get inundated with drive-by feature requests that we truly *want* to do, if only we had the resources (see for example single player campaign, a proper duel mode, matchmaking, finished vehicles). Don't get me wrong here - iterative improvements are certainly welcome, but large feature requests at this point can be roughly translated to "you're gonna have a bad time".

lel but you suggest now as well!

Even though I agree most suggestions are crap (even my own suggestions) wouldn't it be good to have a place to discuss those ideas which ain't crap?

Removing the subforum won't stop ppl suggesting things, it will just make sure they com in as pm's , in random sub forums or as tracker tickets instead. bad idea imo.

Removing the subforum won't stop ppl suggesting things, it will just make sure they com in as pm's , in random sub forums or as tracker tickets instead. bad idea imo.

100% agreement.

But you can put a sticky explaining that most likely none of the devs will ever seriously look at the suggestions

I would prefer keeping this section as long as we have an official stance on its utility, as poVoq is suggesting. That way, I can close unconstructive "drive-by requests" as Antibody puts it, with an actual justification instead of trying to argue every time why it's not realistic to suggest that then wait for it to happen.

You can be sure that those suggestions will go to "Xonotic - General" if this section is closed, and I don't want that to happen.

Development tracker feature requests are actually the proper way to do this. I would prefer to close this section, and force people to go there and detail their requests on the tracker if anything...

I really see absolutely no use for this section personally though, it's a place where people can ask and not do.

As for a place where people can discuss things, that's what other sections are for.... the development subforum for example is a perfect place to bring up an idea you have and discuss it in detail, as I do with many of my ideas while i'm developing them. Additional note, I already get PM's fairly often with such requests, and to each one of those I reply the equivalent of "do it yourself" unless they're relevant to something i'm working on or are easily feasible or such.

I think that abolishing this subfourm would just cause people to ping the shit out of you at all hours of the day or night.

Yeah. I'd rather keep this as a suggestion dump where I either tell people their idea makes no sense, or suggest that they put that in the tracker as a feature request.

That way I can see if they do the request right, and suggestions stay here instead of cluttering other more serious sections like the Dev section. The last place I want to see drive-by requests is the Dev section.