Negativity and You!

Warning: This is a tl;dr rant on the state of CQ&F. Read at your own risk.

I often find myself posting in suggestions on PC, as that's been something I've enjoyed on other forums. However, on other forums I noticed it's much different. Generally in most of the ones which had an active suggestion section, if a thread is a bad suggestion, it would drop to the bottom with no replies. If anyone even remotely liked the suggestion however, they would encourage it, find loopholes to it and try to solve them, brainstorm on how to tweak the suggestion to make it workable for that forum or game. It was fun to participate in these boards; when the admins posted on a thread that was being tweaked for an extended period of time and said it was accepted, the people working on it were ecstatic, and the other people were excited for a new feature even if they didn't work on it.

CQ&F is not like any of those forums. :x

Today I was wondering if it was just me that saw all the negativity in that forum, and if I was focusing on that instead of the good and therefore letting it cloud my judgement. So, ever the scientist, I went through and scanned the forum for every thread under the Suggestion title, and looked to see if the response was generally negative, generally positive, or generally neutral. I immediately removed the 2 grammar/spelling mistake threads, and came up with this:

11 Negative replies
4 Positive replies
3 Neutral replies

It's baffling to me why people on PC seem to dislike suggestions so much. Instead of trying to solve a problem that may come up by tweaking the suggestion, they just say it can't work and leave it. Instead of trying to figure out how it could be done, they just say it's too much work. The person who suggested it is pretty much completely rejected with no chance to make their suggestion workable by multiple people, and it makes the suggestion forum, in my opinion, pretty hostile. I've personally thought of a lot of things that I think would be a good idea for PC, but I usually don't suggest them because, frankly, CQ&F is scary.

Let's take a suggestion into the best case scenario. It's suggested, by some fluke it's accepted by the community. A lot of people say it's a great idea, they would use it if it was implemented, it doesn't seem too complicated, etc. Eventually the posts die down...and nothing happens. An overwhelming majority of the time, no one who actually has the power to implement such things posts and says whether the suggestion is even being considered, let alone if it's on a list to be implemented somewhere or if it was rejected in private. Tbh, although I didn't check every thread, I can bet from memory that of the 18 suggestions visible now, at least 15 have no replies from the people that would be implementing it, and if they do, it has no concrete information about what's being done with the suggestion. Once you suggest something, it seems to fall into a black void. There's little to no support for them, and often it seems as if they fall on deaf ears.

Okay, I know this is getting long and you're probably tired of reading about my frustration. It would just be nice if anyone who reads this that is a regular in CQF, or plans to post on suggestions, stopped and thought before they posted something excessively negative about a suggestion. Think about if the suggestion could work, and the best case scenario, and why it should be implemented, instead of why it's a horrible idea and not worth the time and too much effort and will lag the server too much or whatever. Try to focus on the positives, not on the negatives. Too many people even say "I like the idea but it wouldn't work because of X reason", making their otherwise positive post into a negative one.

Just...try to control your pessimism, PC. Please?

People seem to like my suggestions most of the time, from the memorable one's I've suggested, but lately all i've seen around CQ&F are weird ass questions about how to do simple things, which people either can't look in the FAQ, or do a little research.

Very true. I'm glad someone finally blogged about this issue. However, I can tell you right now that you're most likely going to get nothing but the obligatory "the admins are busy with other, more important stuff" speech. Though it would be nice to know what, exactly, is preventing the admins from implementing the suggestions that actually have merit (beyond busy schedules).

colcolstyles;bt64714 said:

Very true. I'm glad someone finally blogged about this issue. However, I can tell you right now that you're most likely going to get nothing but the obligatory "the admins are busy with other, more important stuff" speech. Though it would be nice to know what, exactly, is preventing the admins from implementing the suggestions that actually have merit (beyond busy schedules).

Click to expand...

You'll be on involuntary DLoA if you speak against your overlords!

Perhaps they are only saving time and considering all aspects of the feature; who'd it affect, who would use it, the resources needed, people to work on it etc.

All of these things need to be considered and sometimes, well, in this case it seems that the suggestions that some make don't really tick the 'useful' box and when we get into detail about the idea, it is revealed that it will actually either not benefit the forum at all or have a negative impact. It might seem negative, but it's actualy just looking through all the nooks and crannies that can be annoying in the future if not detected. So it's not a matter of having a stab at the proposal, but rather determinig if the suggestion is useful or not and what crucial things need to be considered. If there are more negative sides to the idea and nothing can be found or tweaked or even it is'nt worth tweaking then thats when the 'negative' comments come into play. (Sorry if that sounds confusing.)

It might be a great suggestion on the outside but we need to investigate the suggestion further in order to actually make something of it.. and honeslty, you do not know how many times there are questions in that place in which relate to things that can be found in the FAQ and the rules, even the particular board itself. I've seen the "How do I become a moderator" question been asked and answered twice, both within short time periods close together.

But toujours, you do have a good point. :)

Thaaat's probably why I don't go into that section often other than to jump on easy questions, because I don't handle pessimism well. ;^^

Sometimes the issue is that they can't code something that can't be suggested. idk what you think of it, but I think it's a pretty realistic answer if it's coming from one of those who can (an admin) do something about the suggestion. If they can't code it, then they can't code it. But I will agree with you on some other points.

/yeah i suck.

It seems like every single slight suggestion for changing something on the forum is shot down by a ton of members until someone who has the ability to do something about it (usually an admin) comes along and tweaks the suggestion or posting approval of it, and then it seems like the members who shot it down suddenly change their minds. That's usually what I've seen happen when I look at suggestion, anyway. I also dislike it when people come on and, as colcolstyles pointed out, state that the admins are busy doing other things or that they have a life and don't have the time to implement a suggestion. :/

I notice this a lot too. D: When I reply to suggestion threads, I try my best to post why it can't be implemented (which is almost always "it's not a default property of vBulletin and we'd have to write a custom plugin for it and only one of us can do that and he's usually busy implementing a bigger project or working IRL"). Otherwise I think I'm usually pretty clear about why things won't happen or why I think an idea isn't very good. And if I don't already, I'm definitely gonna make more of an effort to brainstorm how an idea could be turned into something great (or at least viable for addition) with some tweaking when I reply to threads.

@Alternative/partially Curious.: As far as questions go, I think very few of the questions aren't silly tbh, but I skipped over the questions for the purpose of this. I only looked at suggestions so they're irrelevant. :)

@Curious.: I think for the most part, people decide how they feel about a suggestion the second they read the first post. If they get a generally negative feeling about it, they'll look for reasons why it can't be implemented. If they get a positive feeling they'll defend it against the inevitable naysayers. But so much would be changed if the naysayers, instead of saying "This doesn't work because _____", tried to say "_____ is a problem but if we made it _____ it should work". It reminds me of my Quick Questions thread; by the end people had generally decided that although a Quick Questions thread may not be necessary, a typo/small nitpick thread would be. Although then that fell into the staff black hole

@Lighting: Learn to write plugins then geez what are you doing :P

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