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This feature request has been out there for 6 months with no real answer. It's not a major enhancement - it's just reversing a (seemingly useless) change.

I don't expect an immediate change. But after 6 months, I DO expect a response of some sort.

If the SE team that triages feature requests is too busy to respond to a feature request within 6 months, it might be time to eliminate the feature request channel. (or give us better guidelines so we don't waste our time suggesting things that never get read)

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    There are 7,700 feature-requests without answers on this site alone. If you'd rather the developers simply answered them all they could probably restart doing actual work on features in a couple of years or so.
    – Robert Longson
    Nov 15, 2020 at 15:22
  • Presumably they take care of the most important things first. That FR might not fall into that category. Just be patient. Sometimes it takes a while.
    – Ollie
    Nov 15, 2020 at 15:27
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    Not at all, more income is the way to get more staff. You can't hire people you can't pay for.
    – Robert Longson
    Nov 15, 2020 at 15:35
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    Dont invalidate answers with an edit
    – Luuklag
    Nov 15, 2020 at 17:23
  • In the current form this question is okay. I asked myself that in the past. I guess, it's one of these economic principles that state that if you do something perfect you are wasting time and money.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:34

2 Answers 2

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NO

They are doing fine.

There are still builds being put out on an almost daily basis (last build was Friday, I admit that was the 13th so it might have been one with a potential huge, still unknown, bug in it). Those builds contain both new features and fixes bugs.

Despite popular belief, we are not the ones deciding what the team is going to work on. Instead SE has paid staff that is tasked with product management and they will prioritize and assign tasks to devs and designers to work on features. Sure product management might check if ideas posted on Meta can help shape a feature but that is as good as it gets.

With the 453 feature requests with a status-review there is plenty of attention from SE staff for features.

Given there is an almost unlimited amount of users that can write and post a bug report or a feature in minutes, no number of SE staff will be able to attend to all these posts in a useful manner. Let alone implementing.

Instead of demanding response or demanding that stuff gets answered and/or implemented, how about we just post feature requests with a different mindset. Don't post as a request but as a suggestion. A suggestion is just that, a suggestion, nothing formal, nothing designed to the final nitty gritty details. Don't pretend the world ends if your silly feature doesn't get resolved in 6 to 8 weeks. The product we use is not paid for. For something that is free to use we get pretty well served.

See also: Can we have a guaranteed pipeline for responses from Stack Exchange?

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  • if 6 months is too extreme of an expectation for feature requests, then what is reasonable?
    – LevenTech
    Nov 15, 2020 at 16:05
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    You seem to totally miss the point. You're not entitled to any response at all. You get feedback when a feature gets implemented, be it now, be it in 8 years, who knows. And sometimes even the feedback gets missed. Then someone else revisits an FR and concludes the feature is implemented.
    – rene
    Nov 15, 2020 at 16:09
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    It is not frustrating if you set your expectation right. I've posted 53 bugs or FR here on MSE. Some got a response and/or implemented. I'm thankful that those post were helpful. For the other posts of mine: meh. Sometimes I get lucky if I can link one or more bug reports to a new bug or feature but beyond that, it is luck, a gamble or waiting for the right moment.
    – rene
    Nov 15, 2020 at 16:26
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    I'm gonna disagree for the sake of communication and expectation setting. It's not unorthodox to have no guarantee of a response for a feature request, but it would be nice to hear back from the team to hear that they've at least seen this request pop on their radar, which would mitigate posts/concerns about them being "overworked".
    – Makoto
    Nov 15, 2020 at 17:35
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    I wouldn't count the [status-review] tag as a response, I'm not sure it actually means anything. There are plenty of post posts that have it, and I don't see them being any closer to getting implemented. The odds of getting SE to implement your idea as extremely low unless they independently arrive at the same idea at some later point. At that point they might read old meta posts and use the information, but the community doesn't really have a say in what gets done. And the [status-review] seems more like a placebo to me.
    – Mad Scientist
    Nov 16, 2020 at 16:54
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I remember that at some point at the end of 2019, there was an announcement that the company is unable to process all the feedback from the community. So the direct answer is likely yes, most of the thousands of existing, unresolved feature requests will likely go largely unnoticed or without any response of some kind also in the future. It's not only the backlog of the last years but also recent feature requests that will likely go without a response. If you are contributing a feature request you must be aware that you likely won't get any official feedback.

That might not be a bad thing though. They have to prioritize, even though I guess that some kind of response about the chances of a feature request could be helpful as feedback to the community and might not take that much time.

The biggest problem seems to be that Q&A with voting is not the same as a full fledged tracker and ticket system or whatever one would use there. The information about the thousands of requests is there but not organized enough.

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    AFAIK the devs do search the Meta's when they are working on feature X for all posts that relate to that. To get a feel of community feedback around that topic, and try to incorporate things that make sense, and/or are upvoted a lot. Just a few days back Yaakov Ellis marked a dozen or so posts status completed when they released a new feature. All were old FR's or bug reports
    – Luuklag
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:14
  • @Luuklag I also noticed it. And for sure there are many requests still there that are obsolete. Internally they will have a different system probably and maybe will refer to public requests so that at the end they can kind of synchronize.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:24
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    Everything that gets tagged [status-review] is automagically added to their ticket system IRC.
    – Luuklag
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:25
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    We need to have a yes and a no answer. There was one from the OP but they self deleted. It really doesn't matter what the answer is or which answer is correct.
    – rene
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:27
  • @Luuklag It's not really a response though. Tickets can be ignored. I could filter for feature requests without a status and call that a ticket too. At some point someone has to prioritize/ do triage and the question is if the community should get some feedback about that.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:29
  • @rene Fully agree. This is not a question of yes or no. The only question is if the workflow is already sufficiently good or can still be improved substantially.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Nov 16, 2020 at 8:36

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