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[META] How can we make the Affinity Forums more useful?


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Hello to all and please hear me out.

I love Affinity Photo. And to all the developers: Thank you. You've made a great product at a reasonable price, and frankly, the entire world of computer program developing should be looking to you as models.

Like all products, there are opportunities for improvement with those by Affinity. You're conscious of that, hence the Feedback for Affinity forums.

However, the forums—I'm posting here in Feedback for Photo on Desktop, but I think this applies to all of them—are kind of a black hole for ideas.

An idea gets posted, it inspires (or not) some conversation, and once that has died down, the idea just kinds of fades away, buried under the endless daily onslaught of new ideas.

Sure, there's a search feature and some use it; I think most don't; but in any case it doesn't perform super-duper well. And even when someone does take the time to revive an existing idea, well, see the previous paragraphe. I know that  you can order threads by "Most Viewed," or "Most Replies." That's already a start for seeing what's important, but frankly kind of a false one.

Etc. etc.

I actually keep a "Little Things List for Affinity" with no less than 30 items on it as I'm writing these lines. However, there's no way I'm posting it here because we're supposed to make a new post for each suggestion, not to mention that I doubt there is anything on my list that has not already been suggested, and, well, I'll quote myself: "buried under the endless daily onslaught of new ideas."

I would like to start a brainstorming session with all the forum users, moderators and developers:

How can these forums be improved, so that truly universally-desired/needed improvements can really take front and center and thus be identified by the developers as valuable goals, desired by many. Inversely, how can we nonetheless not make niche ideas disappear completely, because niches can become entire ecosystems when things change. How can we organize our collective thoughts to give them some discernable order, a real structure that could be explored, mined, developed, enriched by those—and we are many—who are looking to do their part for a great program?

I hope this post is acceptable here, in one of the more active forums, but to the moderators: if you think it would be better elsewhere, do please move it where it needs to be.

I hope we will be many to make suggestions, and to all, happy shooting!

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Hi John,

I had seen that thread. That poster expressed more so a frustration with how slowly new features are rolled out in Affinity, and thus asked the question as to whether it is even worth it to make suggestions in the Forums. In a way, that thread inspired this one. 

My thread here however isn't about the frequency of adding new features to Affinity, but about how to make the forums more efficient tools for identifying what is highly desired by the community, so that the developers will better know what to concentrate their efforts on.

Here, I'm not criticizing the rapidity of new feature role-outs, but seeking to start a discussion on how the forums can be improved.

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I believe that the developers read these forums and that they have a list of ideas culled from these forums. I doubt that they remove ideas from that in-house list simply because they are old ideas, or the list is, arbitrarily, too long. I also believe that we, as members of the public, will never see that in-house list because we are members of the public and therefore should not be privy to what a private company is planning for its software.

For better searching of the forums using DuckDuckGo (or evil Google) with the site:https://forum.affinity.serif.com and/or what ever sub forum plus the term(s) may yield better results.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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4 hours ago, Kerwin said:

how to make the forums more efficient tools for identifying what is highly desired by the community

Even if you did identify some features which are highly desired, what does that mean to Affinity? Your much-wanted features may simply be unimportant (or far less important) to Affinity than they are to you. 

I have a feeling that you would end up being disappointed if you highlight features A,B, and C, but you don't get them. You would then say that Affinity doesn't listen to the forum users. And it could also lead to a 'us' and 'them' situation in the forums.

Your original comment above about making a new post for each suggestion is one of the best ways for requesting improvements IMO. I've been involved in software development with x (or n) thousands of end users. Creating a separate post/task/item/request or whatever you want to call it for each improvement means they can be evaluated individually rather than being lost in a list. If you were to write a post with the title 'my top 30 requests', the noise from respondents would quickly make the post unreadable.

You also make a slightly presumptuous comment with the words 'truly universally-desired/needed'. Not everyone wants every feature. For me RTL text is far more important than BMP or EPUB export. How would you ever square that circle? And before you say 'RTL is not universally desired', there's a few hundred million Arabic/Persian/Hebrew speakers who would disagree with you.

So in my view single posts for single requests is the best way to go. How much they influence Affinity I do not know.

 

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Hmmm, my post doesn't seem to be inspiring the useful brainstorming I was hoping for...

So, let me at least put my idea forward:

I suggest that the Forums could be made more useful for the developers by adding a mechanism with which the forum users could express their support or not for feature suggestions and the like made by others, without necessarily having to add a comment to the thread (to avoid "+1" comments).

My first idea was the addition of a simple upvote/downvote feature similar to what's on Reddit or Stack Exchange.

Feel free to tell me if the already-available "like" feature functions in that way. Should that be the case, I think it would be a good idea to communicate on that and encourage its use, and furthermore to add "most liked" to the top-level choices on the "Sort by" button (it would be a shame to bury it in the "Custom" dialog). 

But then, I started thinking, why not a more graded choice? Greater minds than mine would be needed to find the right wording, but imagine, say, a drop-down menu or buttons tied to the initial post (there where the idea was expressed):

  • "This feature is [critical / desirable / no opinion / unimportant / unnecessary] for Affinity Photo (Designer, etc.)."

With, obviously, "no opinion" being the default.

I'll leave it there. If others choose to continue all the better.

Thanks for hearing me out. And, to the developers: don't worry, I know—we know—that the opinions of those using your products do count for you and that you're not ignoring the suggestions made in the forums. My goal with this idea is to maybe make it easier for you to take the pulse of your user base.

 

 

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There are only "Likes" available at the bottom right of a post, no "Dislikes"

1962037416_ScreenShot2021-07-01at7_54_58AM.png.247fbb62070dd020472259d83f2f9297.png

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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