The ProblemsNow that I have started keeping my four different to-do lists online for all to see (short-term, future DLC, "maybe list," and expansion features), I am seeing just how hard that is going to be to manage as the list grows. It's going to be increasingly hard to find any relevant info on the potential features as the list grows.
Plus, some of the features require more discussion, most likely, and there's not an obvious and consistent way for people to start or add to discussions about each item in the list. Plus, if I add an extended description of the feature, right now it makes it take up vastly more space in the list, making it even harder to parse.
At the moment I have locked those topics, because I don't want the discussion to happen in those threads, potentially making them even more unwieldy. Also, because of the character limits per post, it's entirely possible that eventually I will need more than one post per list topic to make all the features fit. At the moment, people are suggesting features at a rate much higher than I can implement them, even though there's a lot being implemented. There's no reason for me to expect that this problem will do anything but worsen as the game continues to increase in popularity (which so far it has been steadily doing, knock on wood).
Possible Solutions1. I could implement some sort of issue tracking system. The problem is, then anyone who posts in that would need a separate login to that, which is irritating. Plus, the interface for most such systems is not exactly conductive to easy perusal, to say the least. If someone knows of a great, easy (free or cheap) solution that is preferably php/mysql-based, please let me know.
2. I could make a series of four sub-forums for each of those lists, and make a new topic for each item. New topic creation would be limited to admins (so that I can control what goes on what list), but anyone could respond to the topics, which keeps everything together. I could even add a fifth sub-forum specifically for suggestions (one suggestion per topic, ideally), so that those could then be moved into the appropriate other forum. Features in these sections could be "closed" by moving them into "closed feature" sub-forums. The main downside is that there would be a lot of topics there, potentially, and a lot of them would be very brief. A lot more clicking-in than the current system, but probably no more so than your average issue tracking system. If there were some good SMF extensions for dealing with this sort of thing, that would be cool, but I have spent a couple of hours looking for something to help in this regard, and so far have found nothing.
3. I could keep doing what I'm doing, but in my posts make certain sub-categories (basically separate topics) for things like "new ship ideas," "development-time intensive ideas," "moderate-sized interface extensions," etc. Those are just general ideas, I'd come up with some better categories as I analyze these things. The other problem with this one is that it is not very obvious when new features are added or updated, versus in another solution it (1 or 2 above) that would be much more apparent.
4.
Some other solution I have not thought of? In the past most of my issue-tracking systems have been for internal use only, and have been web-based systems that I have coded from scratch. I don't really have time or inclination to do that here, and in those other cases I was using ASP.NET/MSSQL instead of PHP/MySQL, which is what I have available here. So my experience with this sort of thing in a public context, with a tool coded by someone else, is a bit limited; if you know of a product that might work, please do let me know as it's entirely possible I've simply never heard of it.
