If you look at Forum Wishlist topics there are already many overlapping separate threads related to manual cache, using a flight plan to create a manual cache, being able to create a high detail manual cache without zooming in, etc. Many of these separately spawned topics (without a Search, apparently) split the vote on fixing and improving features for the manual cache - or whatever a similar “split-vote” topic might be.
Just as the Category section has meta-groups, e.g. Wishlist is contained in Self-Service, I’d like to suggest that the moderators create at least a meta-group for various separate wishlist threads that are really just recreations of the same basic idea, e.g., fix and improve the manual cache. Then maybe through some basic database “remove duplicates” feature, they could track unique votes for the aggregated meta-category and rank the meta-categories accordingly by vote. Perhaps if the topic creators and moderators had not allowed the “fix the manual cache” category to be split six ways to Sunday, it’s total vote for the basic idea would be even higher than it is already. Or perhaps it’s really not so high? Maybe folks have gone around and voted again and again in all the different threads related to manual cache and all the votes scattered across the many Wishlist threads are really just the same votes duplicated over and over again???
So, TLDR, wish for the Wishlist is to fix the way topics are created, aggregated, and votes are scored so one can more accurately gauge the true enthusiasm for overall fixes and improvements for a specific area.
For anyone who perceives this as off-topic to improving FS 2020, more accurate Wishlist polling will lead to more accurately evaluating where there is the most user enthusiasm for making improvements. So I think my suggestion is spot-on topic.
I agree. Judging from the next Dev update, they appeared to rely heavily on user feedback from this forum–and possibly the initial upvoting–to prioritize the bugs to concentrate on. That will become more difficult to manage as hundreds, if not thousands, of suggestions are added over the months and voted on. So yes, a way of sorting them so that the members can easily vote for their favorites, will make it much easier for the devs to see what should be their next priorities.
I want to start by acknowledging your concern about split topics in the #self-service:wishlist and #self-service:bugs-issues categories.
Ideally, we want one topic per wishlist or bug item to avoid splitting the vote and so we can consolidate the discussion into one place. However, to an extent, this does require people to use the search function before posting.
The moderator team is constantly merging duplicate threads that we find. When we merge a topic into another one, we lose the votes on that first topic, however, the topic is closed and unlisted. This prevents it from getting new votes, replies or from showing up in your search results.
The big issue with this strategy is it requires us to notice duplicate threads. With over 300 new topics a day and 11 volunteer moderators we do miss things. You can help us here by notifying us of duplicate threads. Report () a topic and use the reason ‘something else’, that will allow you to send us a message along with the flag. Include a link to the other topic so we can merge them.
Self-service is the forum category, and it has several subcategories including ‘Bugs & Issues’, ‘Home Cockpit’ and ‘Wishlist’. Creating subcategories below each of those for common issues like the ‘cache’ isn’t a viable option. It would make the forums unbelievably messy and difficult to navigate, would eventually have an impact on the search functions and would invariably cause the moderators to have to move more posts, something we already have to do a lot.
The better way to create ‘meta groups’ for similar issues is to use post tags like the forum-feedback one I applied to this thread. Users who reach Trust Level One can apply tags to their topics.
You can filter posts using tags in a verity of ways:
Select the tag filter on a category index page. This box has an auto-complete/search function so just start typing for a tag and (if it exists) it will show up.
If I selected ‘cache’ here, I would only see wishlist topics tagged with ‘cache’
See all posts sitewide that have a specific tag:
1 Navigate to the tags page
2 Click on the tag you want to look at
Alternatively, if you know the tag name you can go to the URL https://forums.flightsimulator.com/tag/{tag_name}
When using the search function, you can click the blue ‘options’ link to open advanced search and add tags as a filter
If you have any questions/comments please reply below. If you think we should add a specific tag then please mention @Nyx1819@moderators, or send the moderators a private message.
It’s a shame that the merged topics don’t combine the votes, but hopefully it’s early enough in the process that not too many votes are lost.
I have been reading as many of the comments as I am able to, and clicking on the “votes” header has been helpful to sort by the most popular issues so far. However, many of the newer comments have value too, and I’d hate to see them buried all the way at the bottom with 0 votes because they are brand new.
Still, I feel that it’s a valuable way for the devs to get feeback. The Zendesk process is a bit laborious–particularly if you aren’t having a system crash and just want to make a suggestion.
I agree, we were a bit disappointed by that as well but it is a limitation of the vote plugin.
There are plenty of other ways to find topics in a category, you can sort by:
New
Latest - Sort by last post (default)
Top - Sort by most replied in a given day
Tags - Find posts that cover a specific topic (ex ‘atc’ or ‘a320’)
Search function
Discourse can be a huge shock to new users, as it approaches everything in a more modern way. In time things should improve as our average user gets more comfortable with the software.
Users get a notification if they post in a topic that then gets merged somewhere, so hopefully, that will prompt users to re-vote when needed.
Thanks for the suggestions and detailed explanation of the limitations for aggregating similar Wishlist items and getting an unduplicated vote count. It’s a great forum and even if Wishlist votes are split and perhaps reduplicated if folks vote for more than one version of an improvement suggestion or problem fix, I’m sure the MSFS developers will still get a good general sense of where the most demand for improvements and fixes is.
I don’t have any problem finding related threads (that’s how I noticed the diaspora of the manual cache suggestions in the Wishlist). My main concern was just to have some way to more accurately total votes and get a good overall, unduplicated vote count for a particular aggregate idea, e.g., fix and improve the manual cache.
One somewhat related thing to finding thread groups is that I’ve noticed is that when someone writes a very good guide, someone else in a particularly extended discussion thread invariably cites the guide with a link when making a post. So by going to the guide (if there is one) related to a particular topic, one often finds a list, under the initial guide OP post of threads referencing that particular guide. Probably the longer a discussion thread is, the more likely it is that someone will cite the official guide in making a post. So going to a particular guide and looking for the linked threads helps in getting a good idea of what the “hot topic” threads are related to a particular subject area.
The other thing that I’ve overlooked 'til now is that when one searches on any term (besides the options of the Advanced Search), there is a sorting dropdown that is VERY powerful in terms of how you want to see the Search hits ranked. One option for any search is to sort on number of votes or number of likes. I guess that one cannot use logical conditions to filter Search hits. AND, OR, and NOT just seem to be ignored as search term conditions as common, unimportant words. That’s too bad. I wish the Discourse search mechanism allowed for logical conditions to help find related threads, in the Wishlist or not.
I’ve not tried logical search terms ( && or || ), but it would be nice if they worked. If they don’t work there is good news, Discourse is an open-source project so you can request it as a feature and/or contribute to the official repo.
I’m trying to flag one regarding “multiple monitors” in the “Wishlist” section, but boy, did I pick a doozie to try to send you a link to merge it to–there are literally a dozen different discussions on this topic in PC Hardware, wishlists, Cockpit, General discussion… And the areas that allow voting each have several threads on this topic, so you know it’s a popular item. Folks want multiple monitor support in a bad way–especially the folks with custom cockpits.
Has there been discussion of this limitation on the voting plugin with the community manager?
The reason I’m asking is because the community manager needs to be aware of this limitation and actually specifically communicate this to the engineering team, and confirm they’ve actually done this passing on of the message.
Looking at the duplicates already, I did a rough guesstimate of how the top 10 wishlist items would look, and they are indeed different in terms of priority and also what makes the top 10 if you consolidate the votes. There’s a lot of “small” items that actually have hundreds of votes if you tally all the duplicates.
The plugin is what it is, but the engineering team or the community manager can put a change request in with whoever developed the plugin to push priority on fixing this.
If sufficient energy is not put into fixing this, it’s going to make mess of the top 10 lists, and totally confuse everyone about what is, is not, and should be worked on in terms of both features and bugs.
It took over a year to dedupe Wishlist, but we’re now in a position where there are almost no duplicate topics in Wishlist. (So if you see something you want, please feel free to vote for it and don’t be worried that there’s a duplicate in Wishlist that you haven’t voted for!)
At MSFS release time, there was no voting in the forums, and therefore no rules in this category. When voting was instated, we added the rules that we have today, but it took a long time to clean up the free-for-all that pre-dated that. And even today, we have some topics that violate those rules, but they have so many votes that we can’t do anything about them.
As for vote merging, we got that 11 months ago, and it’s still an ongoing process to merge all the votes for all the topics we merged before. Occasionally you may see some (+) notifications out of the blue for some old topics as I merge old votes into the current topics.
The final leg of this initiative is to tag everything in Wishlist for searchability. You can now see the most popular tags on the right-hand side of the category, but there are many more tags than the ones listed there. This should hopefully serve to tie together themes so people can find the things they want to vote for.
) a topic and use the reason ‘something else’, that will allow you to send us a message along with the flag. Include a link to the other topic so we can merge them.
