Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Make providing feedback more accessible by making our own forum #339

Open
DNin01 opened this issue May 28, 2023 · 27 comments
Open

Make providing feedback more accessible by making our own forum #339

DNin01 opened this issue May 28, 2023 · 27 comments
Assignees
Labels
scope: other type: enhancement New feature or request

Comments

@DNin01
Copy link
Member

DNin01 commented May 28, 2023

My suggestion

Having our own feedback forum would create a centralized place for suggestions.

Currently, feedback is spread across a few different places, and on GitHub, it's mixed in with to-dos. With our own feedback forum, community suggestions would be better separated, and everyone would have access to all public feedback and all in one place.

Some users don't have a GitHub or Discord account, limiting their options for leaving feedback. With our own forum, this problem would mostly be solved as, depending on how we handle logging in, users could create Scratch Addons accounts (maybe) or almost everyone coming in could verify ownership of a Scratch account to authenticate and make posts, letting more users join in.

Allowing users to anonymously leave feedback without logging in could also be considered. Such feedback could be posted privately (only maintainers could read it) or made public as an anonymous post (though, that could potentially lead to abuse).

How users could authenticate

Scratch

This would connect the Scratch community to our feedback forum by verifying ownership of Scratch accounts. Everyone on the feedback forum would inherit their username from Scratch this way.

We shouldn't reference our website from Scratch (since our feedback forum's communication feature would very likely violate Scratch's website policies and of course, we don't want to mention our browser extension).

GitHub

This might make it easier to grant some collaborators/organization members privileges. It also provides two-factor authentication. GitHub has already gradually been rolling out a 2FA requirement, so we might as well take that extra protection just in case.

Our own account system

This might work alright if we're okay with potentially not recognizing users from Scratch. However, users may not want to create an account just for this.


@WorldLanguages I know you previously mentioned the idea of a feedback forum.

@DNin01 DNin01 added type: enhancement New feature or request scope: other labels May 28, 2023
@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

The main obstacle for this is trying to balance privacy, ease of use, practicability and avoiding abuse. For example: allowing users to upload files, such as screenshots. And don't forget that moderation will take effort.

Still, it would be beautiful to let users upvote suggestions and move non-technical discussions away from our GitHub issue boards.

@BroJac5246
Copy link
Contributor

This could be very useful. It sounds like a lot happens on Discord, but some people (myself included) don't use it. For authentication, I think we should use Scratch Auth because it's easy and safe.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

The accounts should also have GH profile links

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

I just hope it's going to be a real forum, not something like feedback.minecraft.net.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

My idea was to take most inspiration out of https://feedback.fider.io/ and have it replace https://scratchaddons.com/feedback (feedback form and feedback forum all at once).

It's not that simple because we'd want to let users send private feedback still, but it means we can immediately let other users upvote feedback suggestions from other users. It also gets tricky when users send feedback in other languages and whether we want to localize the strings in the feedback forum. We would also need to moderate for common sense as well as avoiding duplicate suggestions.
It would also be ideal if private feedback could be sent without logging in (to replicate the current friction-less experience of the feedback form), but if we open other actions such as commenting or upvoting anonymously, that can probably go wrong.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

Yeah speaking of moderation...
Someone just sent

"Fuck you suck my long monkey cock"
on the feedback form 👍

@BroJac5246
Copy link
Contributor

Yeah speaking of moderation...
Someone just sent
[Aaaah I don't want to see it while quoting that]
on the feedback form 👍

Was it anonymous? Why do we allow anonymous feedback in the first place? Should we continue to allow anonymous feedback?

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

The example you gave is too limited, there's no replying to replies, no formatting, nothing basically.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

Was it anonymous? Why do we allow anonymous feedback in the first place? Should we continue to allow anonymous feedback?

Yes, it's not really problematic, it ends up in a private Discord channel as of now.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

The example you gave is too limited, there's no replying to replies, no formatting, nothing basically.

There's no "replying to replies" here at GitHub either. Not really a problem.
Also, Fider allows some Markdown in comments, for example you can do bold with **asterisks**.

I believe Fider (with some "addons" on top) can become usable for our use case.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

@WorldLanguages There's quoting here at GitHub. There should be quoting, full markdown and reactions.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

Hmm haven't considered reactions. I doubt there's any reasonable way of adding reactions to existing feedback systems that don't support them out of the box.

@Hans5958
Copy link
Member

Hans5958 commented May 31, 2023

I'm still thinking that something like Fider would be appropriate solely for suggestions/bugs/ideas solely by popular vote. If we want a focused experience (handling user comments/concerns/etc in a case-by-case basis), then the feedback form/Discord server/GitHub Discussion would still appropriate.

I just hope it's going to be a real forum, not something like feedback.minecraft.net.

Lower your expectations. Fider is exactly like that, and I'm not joking.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

I hate it, since there's no discussion whatsoever. You either upvote or not, that sucks.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

it's forkin' time

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

Well, can't we just get a forum (a Discourse maybe)?

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

I hate it, since there's no discussion whatsoever. You either upvote or not, that sucks.

You can post comments under each post though...?

@Hans5958
Copy link
Member

Hans5958 commented May 31, 2023

I hate it, since there's no discussion whatsoever. You either upvote or not, that sucks.

There is a comment system, just like feedback.minecraft.net. Have you clicked an idea?

Well, can't we just get a forum (a Discourse maybe)?

Note that we already had a Discord server and GitHub Discussions, and what we want here is something more accessible.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

You can post comments under each post though...?

What you can't do is comment the comments though.

@CST1229
Copy link
Member

CST1229 commented May 31, 2023

What you can't do is comment the comments though.

Old-school forums and GitHub also don't have replies to replies, instead you quote the post.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

Secret-chest commented May 31, 2023

Old-school forums and GitHub also don't have replies to replies, instead you quote the post.

You don't understand. I don't want reddit, but on normal forums you can quote. You can't quote there, as it seems.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

It won't take many lines of JS to add quoting to a comment system. Supporting > in markdown and adding a "quote" button to each comment would be sufficient

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

Fider != a forum. I do not like this ballot box system. On GitHub we can discuss the suggestion, suggest alternatives, point out problems...

The comments on the other feedback sites are a bit too small, if you get what I'm saying. They don't do anything, since they are outweighted by the OP.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

Secret-chest commented Aug 16, 2023

Also, Fider is incomplete. The first suggestion is "Allow custom suggestion templates". And it has some weird algorithm, since I see year-old suggestions on the front page.

Oh, and private feedback is not supported. Moreover, you only have 1 hour to edit your posts.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

I wouldn't recommend going with a closed-source option (I know Fider is not) since then we're at the mercy of the company.

@WorldLanguages
Copy link
Member

The comments on the other feedback sites are a bit too small, if you get what I'm saying. They don't do anything, since they are outweighted by the OP.

Ideally, mods/admins would edit the original post to reflect discussion after the suggestion was first posted. You're probably not saying "small" literally, but we can tweak the CSS as we want.

The first suggestion is "Allow custom suggestion templates"

Hmm, which templates do you have in mind?

Oh, and private feedback is not supported.

It can be emulated using tags and restricting posts without the "public" from public view.

Moreover, you only have 1 hour to edit your posts.

Didn't notice that, do you have the source? That's worth considering.

I wouldn't recommend going with a closed-source option (I know Fider is not) since then we're at the mercy of the company.

We would probably fork Fider in some way, so we would do fine as long as they provide security patches.

@Secret-chest
Copy link
Contributor

Secret-chest commented Aug 17, 2023

Ideally, mods/admins would edit the original post to reflect discussion after the suggestion was first posted. You're probably not saying "small" literally, but we can tweak the CSS as we want.

The comments are crippled, that's what I mean.

Hmm, which templates do you have in mind?

New addon, setting, enhancement, etc. It was just an example of how incomplete it is.

Didn't notice that, do you have the source? That's worth considering.

From a recent blog:

#3: Grace period to edit posts

This was a popular feature request for a long time and we're happy to announce that users now have 1 hour to edit their posts. This should allow users to enter additional information or reformat their post after seeing it live.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
scope: other type: enhancement New feature or request
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

6 participants