Share observations between users

We only have a few each, so getting them back is good, even if it is just voting to show general support for an idea.

In fact, I wish more of the “feature requests” would start as general discussion first, and after the initial round of tweaks to the idea, then getting it moved to a feature request. Too often the initial idea morphs into something quite different, and the votes may not reflect the current level of interest for the idea as it has become!

I have, and will be doing so more often, given forum links in comments where appropriate, and I know of others that do so too. Active participants will encounter the forum at some stage…

I am breaking my self imposed exile from the forum to comment that I am disappointed and disagree with the decision to move this or any topic out of feature requests.

It seems fine to me to put a big comment saying It has been reviewed and determined to be tough and likely not a priority, and let folks decide if they want to remove their vote.

That being said, It was I believe the top vote getting request on the forum, now it disappears. There should be some way to reflect something the community feels is important and would like to see implemented. I thought that was the whole idea of feature requests.

Unless something is illegal or technically impossible, if added as a feature request, it should stay there.

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The final objective of voting is to get the community’s perspective to the team of developers; since that goal has been achieved, there is no point to continue voting on it. Returning votes automatically is more user friendly (when it works) than requiring people to fiddle with voting and unvoting.

To share some background of the forum’s limitations, I believe the only options for returning votes on feature requests is to close the topic, which halts conversation, or to move it to a different category. Since it’d be nice if the conversation could continue in one place, it seems better to me to move the topic than to close it.

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The above thread is semi-tangentially related to one still in Feature Requests, in case it may be of use or interest. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/connecting-observations-into-linked-groups/1367

The issue as i see it is things get really buried and the feature requests subtype is there to keep the current feature requests easy to find and comment on. I think moving it to general discussion will make it easier and also let people get their votes back.
Granted the process of returning votes is buggy but that’s another issue.

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(attempting to see if closing and opening this topic will return votes)

Didn’t release my vote, it’s still here. I see on another thread that you are working with Discourse on this, so no need to reply.

Seems like the workaround may be to close voting topic, wait a few beats for good measure, change voting topic to different category, then re-open topic under new category.

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking but I want to keep things as-is right now in case it helps them track down the bug.

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but… my vote! :worried:

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it looks like this time it released my vote

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@bouteloua I’m just curious what’s up with re-opening a bunch of old closed feature requests last Friday morning? Some of them still seem to have a lot of votes attached, and I’m wondering how those are impacting vote counts for those users? Apologies if I missed an explanation for this somewhere else…

More info here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/feature-requests-how-to-best-handle-the-voting-system/1952

Thanks, guess I am connecting the dots there…

Did notice that I had one more than my allotted number of votes (9 instead of 8) showing on my votes page after these were re-opened. Forced me to go through and re-evaluate/remove some old votes, at least :wink:

Feel free to move this little side-dialog to that voting system thread if you see fit…