Desire to have Feature requests be public

[joromero]

I know this has come up before, but it would be really, really useful for us as developer and users, to see what are the features / enhancements being requested and / or being considered by Dev and prod Mgmt within Ninja. Having people vote on the things they would like to see would get the ones people most want out the door fastest. Thus a higher cust sat level. As you do this, I would suggesting limiting the voting power of each member. Maybe, only allow them to vote on 5 total, or some # per month. We could move our votes around, so once something is "In Plan" we could use move that vote to another item we want to see prioritized. Also, there are instances where people are requesting things that are similar, and possible combining them you would "kill 2 birds with one stone". Seeing what is out there would also open discussion to possible variations or tweaks that would make the request more general.

This would also make your jobs easier, as we could see what has been requested. You could also have various statuses.
- Being Reviewed/Considered
- In plan next release
- In plan future release xx.x

Just my two cents

John

[NinjaTrader_DaveI]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We've discussed this topic internally before, and we can definitely see the merits of a more automatically transparent suggestion/feedback tracking policy. I say "automatically" because currently it is always possible for users to request the status of a particular SFT tracking number, or even to request the number of votes currently tracked on a particular request, but this obviously requires an additional step and a bit of wait time compared to a fully transparent system.

That being said, a fully transparent system does have its drawbacks as well, from a business standpoint. We've decided to keep the current system of feature request / suggestion tracking in place for now, but we are always open to suggestions for improving our processes, especially when it comes to enhancing the user experience and understanding our users better. I'd be interested to hear how many others feel the same way on this issue.

[koganam]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We've discussed this topic internally before, and we can definitely see the merits of a more automatically transparent suggestion/feedback tracking policy. I say "automatically" because currently it is always possible for users to request the status of a particular SFT tracking number, or even to request the number of votes currently tracked on a particular request, but this obviously requires an additional step and a bit of wait time compared to a fully transparent system.

That being said, a fully transparent system does have its drawbacks as well, from a business standpoint. We've decided to keep the current system of feature request / suggestion tracking in place for now, but we are always open to suggestions for improving our processes, especially when it comes to enhancing the user experience and understanding our users better. I'd be interested to hear how many others feel the same way on this issue.

Well, there are a whole lot of things that a lot of us would like. This is one.

However, I understand that even this simple system will take resources and personnel to administer. Servers have to be set up, databases have to be set up, tracking code has to be written to track both suggestions and votes per person et.c,

So it is understandable if this is a low priority issue.

[stocktraderbmp]

I'd be interested to hear how many others feel the same way on this issue.

I'm sure if you Google "online feature request tracking software" you'll get about 3,000,000 suggestions in around 1/2 a second !!

I use an online scout manager that has over 50,000 subscribed members and their system works fine with members able to vote for suggestions others have made giving full transparency and instant feedback to both parties.

This isn't that hard to do if you really want to.

[sledge]

I'd be slightly interested, but maybe verified license holders only, to keep from being poisoned. You need to have some skin in the game. New suggestions of course welcomed by all and filtered by NT staff as currently done.

[koganam]

I'm sure if you Google "online feature request tracking software" you'll get about 3,000,000 suggestions in around 1/2 a second !!

I use an online scout manager that has over 50,000 subscribed members and their system works fine with members able to vote for suggestions others have made giving full transparency and instant feedback to both parties.

This isn't that hard to do if you really want to.

What you say is true.

However, things are a bit different for a corporation that has to deal with 40k+ customers, as opposed to an individual, or even a much smaller company like mine.

Given all the personal data that they have to retain (remember that a big chunk of their revenue is from subscriptions, so they are keeping all that data), network security is probably a bigger issue than even their development, if you can believe that. That means that they cannot really afford to put ANY software on their network without a pretty long and intense vetting process. then they have to stay on top of that same software for maintenance, and operations. All that takes resources. they have to set priorities.

Case in point, see how we cannot see the larger descriptive pictures in the sharing section of the forum? That is because they had to put in a security patch to the forum software, and that was one of its side effects. They will not (correctly) back out the patch, even at the cost of convenience, and in all probability have someone working on either resolving the issue, or vetting new software. That is another cost.

[stocktraderbmp]

I agree 'K' - however the online scout manager I use have their "feature requests" hosted on a separate network, separate server, separate data centre. This way there is no access to their more sensitive data which contains details of millions of youths and children. The 2 are completely separate though run by one entity.
NT could do the same - simply logging in as administrators for updates or have data analysis software linked to the server to produce information on requests that were "trending" (apologies for the use of a horrible social media term).
In fact I am sure if it were 'hosted' the data and feed back would be collated for them on a fancy looking dashboard. Administrators would simply examine the most popular requested features and post simple 'Being considered' 'In development' or 'Rejected' with a short explanation.

That being said and with NT8 having taken 3+years to emerge from the cocoon - YES - this will be well down on the 'To Do' list; I suspect!