Where to post feature requests?

A while ago this forum discussed and subsequently introduced the idea of Support & Help Requests. The response to this has been overwhelmingly positive and greatly added to its appeal of being particularly user-friendly (as opposed to merely user-centric).

I know that Martin Wimpress said this:

Is there a possibility to indicate this more clearly in the forum? There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm coming from new users and many of them may have ideas for new features.

The current forum structure does not use that energy effectively enough. Why not rename Thoughts & Feedback to Feedback & Feature Requests? Once there is enough consensus and approval from the community and ultimately, the development team, these feature requests could then be moved to Development Discussion. This would provide non-technical users with a greater sense of participatory agency while preventing Development Discussion from being cluttered with pre-development comments.

I think there should be an easily recognizable way for new forum members to post feature requests. Especially the perspective of new users is invaluable as they perceive their new OS environment in a fresh way. More advanced users tend to get used to workarounds, often tweaking their system manually and many potentially innovative ideas might get lost on the way.

PS: Add an 's' to the 'discuss' in Development Discussion.

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Well, to answer the topic’s title, this stuff should go in Thoughts & Feedback. While having ideas to improve the distro are great, it’s also good to hear what’s working well (and not so great) too. :scales:


There’s a few reasons why a feature request category might be a bad idea:

  • Category fragmentation :frowning:
  • Developers do not actively visit the community to implement said requests.
    • Except of course Ubuntu MATE’s applications and features. :wink:

If there’s something that can be developed - that’s one for the Development Discussions - so feature requests could go there if they are detailed but concise.

PS. Thanks for spotting that typo, fixed!

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I agree that category fragmentation is something to avoid, but as this most recent example shows, it is less than clear where to post feature requests and how to communicate them effectively. Only a minority of Ubuntu MATE forum users are developers, yet many of them have good ideas on how to improve the system.

My recent suggestions are essentially aimed at bridging the gap between feedback and development, of having ideas and how to implement them. The more participatory agency there is for average users, the easier it is for them to tolerate bugs and difficulties. This is something not to be underestimated, especially when wanting to keep users engaged with improving their operating system and to remain active in the forums.

Since there is already a tag named #bugs, why not add another one named #feature requests. While this would not guarantee that any feature requests are implemented, they can at least be more readily discovered through a tag search and invite further participation. Now that I think about it, this seems to be a better suggestion than renaming an entire category. Thoughts & Feedback and Development Discussion are good as they are.

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