/home/nand

I slowed down a bit this week end, I do not want to experience a burnout again! So the changelog is quite short:

• Dramatically improve responsiveness when displaying ideas lists: Locally, the SQL is now processed in 300ms instead of 5000ms. I discovered that subqueries are *bad*.
• Ideas in the “Implemented ideas” and “Ideas being worked upon” list are now displayed by date of status change. That means that the most recent ideas that are marked as “Done” will be displayed first.
• Some work on stats, but nothing visible yet.

Expect this during the beginning of the week.

Stats of the week: 500,000 votes, 12700 users, 4600 ideas (in which we can find 300 deleted and 800 dups), and 1700 dup reports.

In my opinion, as a developer, listening once in a while to user input should be almost mandatory. It brings us back to Earth and reconnects us to the expectations of our users. It also gives us a glimpse of how they experience our work, something that as developers, we can’t sense. And that’s gold.

Ok wait, I know the drill, we are in the FOSS world, where the developers only do what they care/want to do. Right. We are already full of ideas, no need for more, and we don’t have time. Right. But still I would urge any developer who actually wants a successful software, to listen to their users once in a while. You’ll be astonished at how your view and their view of your work is different. (Hey, I say “listen to”, I do not say “do as they tell you”!)

But users are not giving their feedback for free : they want a counterpart. They want updates, they want to know what’s going on. That’s a fact, and that was with that in mind that the website was designed (Status on ideas, developer comment area). But reading some ideas, I’m amazed at how much some of them actually want back : Show where and when the Brainstorm idea has/will be implemented, Change the idea’ status when a Brainstorm administrator has read it,…

A nice “idea” to finish

This time the focus was on duplicates prevention. Here’s the menu:

• Automatic AJAX search for duplicates when submitting a new idea.
• Listing of all the duplicates of an idea, and a link to the “report dup” page, on the idea page.
• Users can now see the ideas they have demoted/promoted.
• A new front page ordering that shall avoid vote hijacking of big duplicates. For now it seems to behave not so well on the week and month page, maybe reverting on these lists.
• A new category, Security.

Enjoy!

Because everybody like stats (and because it’s not implemented yet!), here are some numbers for you, concerning the week of the launch (28th feb - 5th march):

• 10796 users
• 338319 votes cast! (that’s around 31 votes per user)
  • 238043 were +1 votes
  • 100275 were -1 votes
• 10446 comments posted on ideas!
• 3145 ideas
  • 326 deleted (spam,…)
  • 578 marked as duplicate (out of 1125 duplicates report submitted by users)
  • 2567 remaining

On the remaining (some low numbers can be explained by the fact that some categories were added afterwards):

• Accessibility: 17
• Brainstorm: 154
• Education: 2
• Gaming: 34
• Graphics: 101
• Hardware support: 17
• Installation: 230
• Internet & Networking: 207
• Look and Feel: 290
• Multimedia: 200
• Office: 224
• Programming: 3
• Server: 46
• System: 649
• Others: 393

New front page, new smarter algorithm, new roles for moderator and Ubuntu developers, new categories,… Lots of new stuff! I believe all this will greatly help to give more attention to new ideas. Check out the new Brainstorm! Here’s the Fridge announce.

Meanwhile we have discovered a few bugs that should be quickly fixed tomorrow.

Expect a big batch of updates on Brainstorm tomorrow!

Right, here are new stats:

• 2000 ideas (which a good proportion of interesting ideas, and around 100 concerning the website itself)
• 7800 users

So basically, we are overwhelmed At first we planned to first use the most voted ordering as frontage for a few weeks, and then, when the number of ideas would have began to be non negligible, we would have switched to a new ordering helping new great ideas to show up on the top page. But it seems I will have to hurry up a bit!

Over last evening, I’ve been gathering input here and there, in Brainstorm, forums, IRC, LP bugreports, and I have compiled this TODO list. Let me know if you have some new interesting idea! Meanwhile, I’ll start on the most pressing issues.

Here is a great idea I wanted for some time!

You can easily use such images too! On an idea page, go to the “Help promote it!” link!

Whooaaah! OMG! Whoah!

Ok, here are the stats at T+20 hours:

• 1000 ideas, with almost 1000 votes for the top ones !!
• 3200 new users, with currently 50 new users every 13 mn!!
• 1 slashdottage
• 1 front page diggage
• 1 front page wired article
• And on the overall, a pretty good content quality!

Honestly, I’ll tell ya: We met a bet before launching : I said 500 ideas in a week, heno 450 and stgraber 500+. We are really surprised, pleased and amazed by the success so far!

A batch of fixes will be updated this morning. It will include:

• IE users does not longer get a 404 (yes, IE users were excluded until now because of a 302 redirect, bad IE!)
• Users can now successfully update an idea.
• New categories
• And a few others small fixes…

Edit: Ok, now we are getting to 50 new users every 7 minutes… Poor sysadmins

Hey, Ubuntu brainstorm has been launched!

Ubuntu users can now submit their ideas and suggestions for Ubuntu, and vote for them. This will greatly boost Ubuntu’s ability to assess the user base expectations, and act accordingly. Two months before the next Ubuntu Developer Conference, I think this is a great time to start gathering input and brainstorming some rocking stuff for the Ibex!

Go, start unleash your ideas! And if you want, digg it!

Update: Due to a badly handled redirect, IE users will face a 404 not found. Shall I find a bugreport?