Can employees please provide some indication that a lower-priority request is being looked into or has been internally reported?

Question

This is not a duplicate of Can we have a guaranteed pipeline for responses from Stack Exchange?. That specifically refers to high-profile requests that receive a lot of votes, and the answer there addresses that specifically. This, on the other hand, is for more minor things that don't receive lots of votes and views, that the SE team deems of low priority. Additionally, the "response" there refers to a decision and a status tag; this, on the other hand, refers to something to the effect of "we're looking into/discussing this and will make a decision regarding status".

Sometimes, when people post a bug report or feature request here on meta, the SE team decides it's of lower priority, and decides not to respond to it for the time being. More than likely, they place it onto their internal issue tracker and possibly give it a "low" priority.

But from the outset, it appears that such requests are being completely ignored. I'm willing to make the good-faith assumption that each of these requests is in fact being looked at by an employee, who decided not to take action at that time.

Ideally, it would be great if SE opened up their internal issue tracker to the public, to see what priorities the team has assigned to every request, but I can see some issues with that (e.g. "why is my important issue low priority?").

I think it would be great for SE's relations with the community if they at least, for example, commented on each request that gets logged in their internal issue tracker with a comment to the effect of "we're aware of this issue and are looking into it". This way, it's clear to everyone that SE is listening to people on meta. This was an important point in Monica Cellio's Medium post, which said that despite all the internal chat that surrounds an event, it makes it seem like no action is being taken:

I know through internal channels that you’re thinking about how to respond more to all this. But internal channels do nothing for the public record.

Yes, I'm aware that sometimes employees are busy handling things, but a simple comment to this effect takes very little time.

Answer 1

I guess low priority is an essential thing here.

If SE opened up the internal issue tracker, I can see it as a constant source of distraction - folks going "What about my ticket/post". I know a few users often ask about their support tickets, and a few kinda are a pain about it. The latter sort will be camped out there.

SE isn't an open source project, even in its heyday.

Practically, if they hired someone whose only job was to do this, and rubber stamp every single feature request that didn't fit into the road map, it would still slow things down as they checked. SE's pretty tight on staff right now.

TBH, I think a lot of this can be answered in Tim Post's post - here. I'm was tempted to cherry pick a few bits from it in supporting my answer, but you probably need to read it all in spite of that (Sorry!).

In short, though, it's hard enough for SE to keep us abreast of major changes, let alone the back end. I've learned a lot more from following a few key folks on Twitter than Meta sometimes.

To quote Tim:

Meta doesn't track bugs well, it doesn't track feature requests well, it doesn't indicate presence from us well (how do you know what stuff Joe Friend has been looking at recently for distant scheduling?) and quite frankly, even working 60+ hour weeks, there's still not enough time to get everything done so adding even more writing on top of the PMs list of things to do isn't going to help.

So, meta is going to suck for this.

I think, in 2019, we're going to have to bite the bullet and replace at least bug tracking and feature requests with something else, or have something else behind the pipeline consuming meta and making sure it gets put somewhere else in ordered form so we can work from it. I don't know what that's going to look like, I just know what we've got isn't working, and breaks even more embarrassingly by the week.

There might be something in the future, but it's something they need to work out. That said, I don't think minor feature requests would be a priority here, and I don't think it will be a classic issue tracker.

I've always found that effecting change on meta is just a little political - it's about aligning our goals and theirs, getting buy in for an idea, and that's something hard to do for 'minor issues'. It's not like the old days when a dev could go "eh, I can fix this in 10 minutes" and went and did it.

The best solution for pluralisation bugs for example, might be to mail users a sheet of appropriately sized S stickers...