Submitting feature Ideas more easily.

Submitting feature Ideas more easily yet keeping them organized too.

Several times in the past I and others had suggested a bug tracker and feature tracker. Now TSS has it. Great. However ideas are probably being lost when some users maybe have not had time to learn it yet (or maybe they do not want to learn it). However their idea(s) may be excellent. Loosing these ideas is not good for TSS. So the suggestion is this. If a suggestion comes into the forum rather than the tracker, TSS should enter it in the tracker (which makes sense since they are going to know the contents much better than all the users). When TSS enters the new feature idea they should have a drop down box that they can use to quickly enter the user name of the person who submitted the idea in the forum. This process should automatically send the user the details as to where it was entered in the tracker and give a link directly to those details. This would allow the user to keep tabs on it and they may submit more ideas on this topic. It will get them started in using the tracker.

In addition to this I think the link to the tracker entry should be put into the forum thread where the idea originally came in. This way users who are tempted to comment in the forum will be able to click and go directly into the tracker entry instead. Another reason to do this is the original user who submitted the idea may loose the email which has the link. This way if they had adjustments or sub-ideas related to the their original idea they may go back to the forum to find the post they created and there they can find the link to the tracker.

Maybe the tracker could even link back to the original forum post some how.

I was thinking along a similar line when I posted my most recent suggestion on this forum. I agree PM is an excellent tool, but one drawback is that a feature request submitted there is effectively hidden form most users because I suspect they don't frequently visit PM just to view them. They mostly go there to submit an issue or a feature request themselves. So, I agree there needs to be a better approach to handling feature requests. I feel there is a need to handle them more openly to readers of this forum so we can discuss it in the traditional way (PM is too cumbersome for discussion purposes) and vote on it more easily. Perhaps this is better done on a separate forum.

I think both have their strengths. Allowing the bug tracker to have an unlimited number of links to forum posts (not the thread but the post) and of course having an unlimited number of links allowing a forum post to point to several bug tracker entries resolves the concerns. Notifying the person who creates a post of newly created bug tracker entries created by TSS after they read a post would be very impressive to users for obvious reasons. They might want to have a standard email that goes out. Here is what I am thinking it might contain.

Hello (user name),

As of comments/suggestions/concerns you mentioned in post (link to the forum post) we have created a bug tracker entry at (link to the bug tracker entry). Thanks for your input. Feel free to place any additional suggestions in the bug tracker entry (give instructions on how to go about this and a link for additional instructions). If appropriate we welcome additional comments in the forum thread as well.

Thanks again,
TSS.

There is a similar parallel thread by Tresor on the same topic. I am suggesting to adopt an idea exchange. Link: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8560&p=40325#p40325

Any thoughts?