Announcing the NI Idea Exchange!

[Laura F.]

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altenbach wrote:

Found the problem:

You are linking to http://ni.stage.lithium.com/ni/i/idea.gif (which seems not public!), in the "about" area on the right.

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Oh goodness... this is what happens when I try to do too many things too quickly!

Thanks for keeping me in line 

Thanks,

Laura

[Laura F.]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the feedback and spreading the word!  I am very happy to see so many ideas posted in such a short amount of time.

Allowing the idea author to edit his or her idea indefinitely is a good point and I see how it could be useful.  I need to do some research to see if this is feasible or not for us.  

Unfortunately, we are having an issue with the standard 10 minute time period that you should be allowed to edit your idea.  I hope that this bug will be fixed soon so in the meantime I am happy to edit any idea that is sent to me via the "Report to Moderator" option.

Regards,

Laura 

[Jim_Kring]

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Laura F. wrote:

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the feedback and spreading the word!  I am very happy to see so many ideas posted in such a short amount of time.

Allowing the idea author to edit his or her idea indefinitely is a good point and I see how it could be useful.  I need to do some research to see if this is feasible or not for us.  

Unfortunately, we are having an issue with the standard 10 minute time period that you should be allowed to edit your idea.  I hope that this bug will be fixed soon so in the meantime I am happy to edit any idea that is sent to me via the "Report to Moderator" option.

Regards,

Laura 

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Laura,

Thanks!  This is all great to hear.

-Jim

[AristosQueue (NI)]

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Laura F. wrote:

Allowing the idea author to edit his or her idea indefinitely is a good point and I see how it could be useful.  I need to do some research to see if this is feasible or not for us.   

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Actually, allowing edits would not be good. The problem is that users may Kudos an idea when it is written one way and then the idea gets edited to be something completely different. Imagine an unscrupulous user who posts "We want Zoom!", waits until it has 137 Kudos and then changes the idea to "All wires should be the same color regardless of datatype". And then LV R&D, thinking our users really want this, implement it.

Yes, I picked an extreme example, but my point is that once voting starts, you cannot change the text without invalidating all the votes. If you decide an idea is a bad idea, post a new idea and ask the moderator to remove your old idea. 

[Jim_Kring]

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Aristos Queue wrote:

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Laura F. wrote:

Allowing the idea author to edit his or her idea indefinitely is a good point and I see how it could be useful.  I need to do some research to see if this is feasible or not for us.   

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Actually, allowing edits would not be good. The problem is that users may Kudos an idea when it is written one way and then the idea gets edited to be something completely different. Imagine an unscrupulous user who posts "We want Zoom!", waits until it has 137 Kudos and then changes the idea to "All wires should be the same color regardless of datatype". And then LV R&D, thinking our users really want this, implement it.

Yes, I picked an extreme example, but my point is that once voting starts, you cannot change the text without invalidating all the votes. If you decide an idea is a bad idea, post a new idea and ask the moderator to remove your old idea. 

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You raise an interesting question, but I doubt that people who have great ideas (which would get a lot of kudos) would try to game the system by changing a good idea into a crappy idea.  Also, I think that the benefits of allowing people to edit their ideas would far outweigh any downside.  Plus, at the end of the day, NI staff will be deciding and designing which features to implement, anyway, and I know that you're all pretty sharp

[TCPlomp]

One observation is that Altenbach writes very thorough ideas.

It would be good if someone wrote an idea over 5 lines, the author should write a summary and the idea would be opened on a click.

Could it be possible to have a 'normal' view of the ideas, just like the regular forums? Titles only.

And how do you deal with the 'aging' of ideas?

The same problem went with uservoice.com where a new idea had very big problems getting up in the up-voted list because the old top ideas had very much kudos.

Ton

[altenbach]

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TonP wrote:

One observation is that Altenbach writes very thorough ideas.

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Sorry about that 😄 I've been misunderstood too many times in the past, so I want to make absolutely sure to get the idea across.

However, I agree it would be nice to have another field (between title and body) that contains a brief summary, abstract, etc. of the idea.

Will "aging" really be a problem here? I am sure that really good ideas will always percolate up! 😄

[tst]

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TonP wrote:

Could it be possible to have a 'normal' view of the ideas, just like the regular forums? Titles only.

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That's exactly what I've been asking for.

The way I see it this feature has two basic types of users (I'm ignoring LV R&D), who will both have problems with the system:

1. A user who wants to submit an idea. The problem is that it's too easy. They should be forced to search before posting to avoid duplicate suggestions (as has already happened several times).
2. A user who wants to follow and vote. If that user is only interested in new ideas, then they can solve their problem by subscribing to the entire exchange by email or RSS. However, if that user wants to follow and participate in the discussions, the current format is woefully inadequate and the boards view makes a lot more sense.

Laura, some more feedback:

1. I would suggest giving the kudos to a post in a thread, not to the suggestion itself. That way, people can vote on specific ideas other people offer.
2. The latest comments section simply doesn't work. Other than not being sorted and not showing useful info like the time of the last comment or the number of new comments, it also simply doesn't show some threads which have newer comments than the threads it does show.
3. Personally, I dislike the visual look of the exchange. I know that whitespace for separation is all the rage, but I like good old fashioned borders and containers. A thin line each idea would not create noise and would make it a lot easier to read.

[tst]

Re. the comments issue, what I did at the end was to subscribe to the entire exchange by email (through the exchange option link in the main page) and then I setup a label and filter in Gmail. This sends an email whenever there's a comment. Gmail creates conversations by title, so I only need to follow a single link for each idea. This isn't perfect, but is reasonable as a temporary workaround.

Laura, right now, the main page has some of the text in French. This doesn't happen in the individual threads and the marked pieces of text seem to be the only one which are in French.

[Laura F.]

Everyone -

You should be able to edit your idea now for 10 minutes after you've posted it without seeing an error.  If you are submitting a new idea I'd love to see confirmation that this is working correctly 🙂

tst- is that language problem persisting for you? Or did you just see it once?

Thanks,

Laura