I think we should have some mechanism that automatically flags certain meta posts (both child metas and here) for Stack Exchange staff attention when they get beyond a certain point. The thresholds would be something like (subject to tweaking):
Post is feature-request or bug
Post has a score of 50 or more (possibly adjusts based on site).
OR
- Post receives a bounty from 3 or more users (this will take weeks, I know, that's the point)
The idea is to prevent very highly voted posts from falling through the cracks. Here are some examples where this has happened (or, at the very least, a very long time passed between a staff response and an answer). These are just the some of the ones that eventually DID happen:
- Can we have a tool-tip with the full title for links to hot meta posts that don't fit into the side bar?
- Can we have [mcve] expand to http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve in comments, please
- Badge progress reports
- Indicate the color (bronze/silver/gold) in tag badge notifications
- The flag pop up on heavily downvoted answers has grey text
- Custom jsFiddle for Stack Overflow
- On beta sites, the monospace formatting in a spoiler quote is evil.
- Warn new users when they ask a question after a previous question is closed, downvoted, or deleted
The bar for this should be very high. Possibly higher than the one I propose above. But it should exist, to handle the outlier cases that fall through the cracks, plus it will encourage more meta participation and voting (since it will add to the perception that voting really does matter), which can only be a good thing.
Response to @JonEricson comment
Could you expand on how you think this feature would help solve problems on the sites? It's not hard for us to slap status-declined when we don't like a feature request or don't have time to work on it or when it's blocked by some other feature or when the request is unclear, etc. But I don't know if that will fix the underlying problem. (As an aside, it's strange to call out meta posts that have been addressed. Is the problem that they weren't fixed fast enough? If so, I don't see how your proposal addresses that.)
In at least two of those links, someone tweeted at @balpha before they got noticed. In a third, I custom flagged one for dev attention and @AnnaLear fixed it within three days later. Some of these are huge fixes, some of them are small; the bottom line is that I don't know what you have noticed and what you haven't, which is why I didn't link to questions that haven't been addressed. Searching for unaddressed things might turn up lots of stuff you've thought about but never got a status-declined, or it might turn up stuff that fell through the cracks.
However, these questions took six months or more before any dev response, at all, but they were things that Stack Exchange clearly did support, because they happened. A system that nearly guarantees a dev response for the most popular posts will serve to:
- Prevent very easy things from falling through the cracks, like #1, #2, #5, and #7 above
- Facilitate communication "We love this idea, but it's very hard!" Like #6 above
- Increase morale and user participation on meta "hey my votes and bounties actually accomplish something!"
This is about fixing easy bugs faster / without missing any, and about increasing communication on the more difficult things.
Related, but not dupe (because this is a specific proposed solution, not a question):
- What are the effective communication channels for effecting change to SE?
- How do I get attention for old, unfixed bug reports and feature requests without official responses here on Meta?
- Why don't all bugs and feature-requests have moderator status tags?
- When will a feature-request be marked as either status-completed or status-declined?
- What is the process of a feature-request?
- Why don't we get responses from bug reports?
- Why all feature requests are not taken into consideration?
- Does the Team actually pay special attention to Featured questions on Meta?
- How long should I wait before developers implement feature request?
- Why are there so many feature-request with no official response?
- How often do developers monitor site-specific metas for bugs?