Clarify Suggestions Forum Information

Suggestion Summary:

Right now, the suggestions are confusing and the pinned posts are not often updated. I would like to propose a rework alongside an announcement post of the suggestions forum. Here's how I personally would do it; First things first; I would sort through the suggestions in the "Under Consideration" section and remove suggestions that will no longer be added to PokefarmQ and have no chance of being in PokefarmNew. Ideally they would be moved to rejected alongside a brief, copy paste post by a moderator in each one, explaining that there is a rework of suggestions being done and that this suggestion no longer fits into Pokefarm's development path. Second; Right now, suggestions are not necessarily for PokefarmQ, and getting them into "under consideration" does not guarantee them to be added to PokefarmQ. In my opinion, when looking at the suggestions form for the first time, this is unclear. Users should understand what it means for a suggestion to be moved to this location without having to go digging and asking through word of mouth. (OPTION 1); There should be a pinned post in the main suggestions section or the "Under Consideration" section detailing what happens to suggestions moved to "Under Consideration". (OPTION #2); Creating two new categories named "Under Consideration for PokefarmQ" and "Under Consideration for PokefarmNew." This would help to elimnate confusion between what it means to have a suggestion moved to Under Consideration. The "Under Consideration for PokefarmNew" should have a pinned post linking to wherever the devlog/information about PokefarmNew is on site. Third; Updating the "Summary of Rejected Suggestions" with some of the more recent suggestions rejected that were popular & appointing a staff member to keep this updated on a semi regular basis (this will depend on how fast suggestions move, but every 4-6 months sounds good to me). Edit; Found a recent suggestion for this step as well! Fourth; Posting an announcement detailing these changes and why they're happening.

Positive Points:

• Improve user experience when using forms
• Improve staff transparency

Negative Points:

• Would draw attention to the already-made changes in these forums that users previously didn't know about, potentially sparking confusion and annoyance.
• Would involve sorting through old "approved" suggestions and potentially upsetting users who expected their "approved" suggestions to be put through.

I would like to mention that the above two points are not valid reasons to avoid making this change, in my opinion. The changes made to suggestions and the decisions made about old "approved" suggestions are already made; continuing to not acknowledge these decisions won't stop the above from happening, but only delay it further until it happens without staff's control.

Reasons for Consideration:

This would be a massive improvement for quality of life, users would be able to understand the suggestions forum much better. This would be a massive rise in transparency between staff and users, and I belive many users would appreciate the honesty and attempts to make things more clear, even if they're not happy about the actual changes themselves.

Fully support. As the creator of the “update the summary” suggestion I’ve felt this way for awhile. This site seems to have a strange balance between keeping everything as G-rated as possible “because of the children”, but also expecting a LOT out of these children? Most 8 year olds who want to suggest a new feature might read an “IMPORTANT: READ THIS BEFORE SUGGESTING” thread or notification that pops up when creating a new thread, but there is ZERO chance they are going to dig through 10 years of rejected suggestions to see if it’s been suggested before because they just don’t think that much about it. So like, either a notable chunk of the site’s users are children and we need to make accommodations for them (like banning any google-able acronyms that may refer to inappropriate content, AND making the suggestions forum more accessible to them), or there aren’t that many children and we need to tailor to the teens and adults here (allowing such acronyms, art & talk on the forums, AND expecting users to put in more work and use more critical thinking skills before suggesting). Those are just some examples but right now there seems to be a weird mix of both.

Bump

The team is actually working on this, ideas are being discussed. So this is definitely "Under Consideration" and even "Underway"!

That's fantastic to hear! I look forwards to it <3

I apparently can’t read tonight please ignore me haha

Just wanted to say that with the balance updates coming, a great chance to clean up and fix the suggestion forums would be after all the 2024 updates are pushed. Revamping suggestions for the start of 2025 would be a great oppertunity, since a lot of the balance updates address current suggestions, approved or not.

I would add on to this to suggest maybe some third party or locally hosted solution outside of PokeFarm for rejected and under consideration suggestions be used. Most of these services I'm referencing use tickets which are much easier to track and label the status of, and are easier to search than this forum.