What is the "threshold" for how many likes/comments an idea must get to be added to the development queue?

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Often here on the forums I see a lot of responses along the lines of “if this idea gets more likes/comments, we can investigate it further for development”. Granted, that’s not a bad response- I do something very similar when communicating with customers in my role as development and release manager at my workplace. Without it, there’s no way to leverage individual user comments and desired features vs the backlog of items on the roadmap, and I am grateful that all of you are laser-focused on making TroopTrack as community- and user-driven as possible. Thank you for that! :slight_smile:

I just don’t know how many likes is considered “enough” to push an idea over the edge, especially since I see a relatively small number of people actively commenting on the forums. I also notice a lot of people don’t use the “like” feature, which causes a lot of ideas to wither on the vine due to the auto-expiration on threads.

Not expecting a number, but a general idea would help me know how to navigate the community better and contribute more meaningfully.

Again, thank you for all you do! You are a huge reason why we have a successful scouting program for all our youth and their families, and I am deeply grateful! :grinning:

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Hi @JaredHonda,

Any bug that we can confirm and reproduce is put on the development list.

As far as “Ideas”, there isn’t a specific number we look for as far as likes and comments. Every few weeks or even sooner if we are available, we look through the community and talk about the ideas and the response from the rest of the community. Unfortunately there are many where a user says “Hey, this idea would be a huge help to me” and we ask “Great, who else would it be helpful for?” and we may get a response like “I don’t know, but I’m sure they are out there. Just because it hasn’t been requested, doesn’t mean people don’t want it” and we say “absolutely, let’s hear from those people.”

I get alerts for anything that receives a comment that I’m tagged in or have commented on so it’s pretty easy for me to keep an eye on the statuses of the ideas in the community. For me, if I see 17+ comments of approval, that makes it very interesting to me. That means the feature can actually help a good amount of users. Often times though, a lot of comments, doesn’t mean a lot of support. Someone may stray from the original idea by putting their twist on it and then we may have a division of support.

We have a high level overview of where we want to take TroopTrack and the features that would be HUGE to everyone. These big features take a lot of time and money so it’s hard to put them aside sometimes to work on a user requested feature. Other times, we’ll be discussing the most popularly requested features and Dave will say, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while. I’m gonna do that” and he will release the feature the next day. That’s super rare, but it happens.

The big important thing we are working on now is the new emails feature and the membership resolver. We have HUGE plans beyond that, but we do have to stop to smash bugs sometimes.

Bottom line: PLEASE have patience with us. We work very hard and read EVERY request on the community. Don’t feel like you’ve been neglected if I don’t expressly say “We are going to develop you idea.” Most good ideas, will likely gain support in the community and we will develop them or eventually develop them.

Thanks for asking!

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You are the man! I completely understand what you are saying since, as I already mentioned, I’m the development and release manager for our company and we face the same perpetual struggle of not letting things get derailed due to user requests, and having to find a good balance between the two. I apologize if anything in my comments came off as petulant or demanding, because that’s the last thing I want to make you or anyone else there feel- it’s because of you that we have a lot of the success in the lives of our boys and their families that we do. To say anything less would be ungrateful!

Your thorough response definitely helps me get a better idea of the vision for the community and how it is I can contribute more meaningfully and not allow myself into the fall into a “I want it now!” state that can happen in any online community setting when it comes to product development. I sing praises to TroopTrack on an almost daily basis to all of our parents, scouts and leaders so you’ve got nothing to worry about from me in that regard.

You’re all aces in my book. Even if TroopTrack ceased development today, it’s still the best troop management software out there and I would use it until the servers themselves die. I appreciate all of your time, efforts and patience with US in the community since it’s not an easy task to leverage all of those needs on a daily basis- that’s my life every single day at my workplace too, so I can sympathize.

Again, thank you! Have a great week, and thank you again!

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@mlsully2002 Hi Matt, Thanks for the explanation of how things get into your releases. Would it be feasible if your team shared a enhancement roadmap from the things from the community forums? There are some requests in the community forums that appear to be small requests that are really valuable sooner for our troop and I would assume many other troops. (e.g. add an OA eligibility report or fix duplicate event invites). I saw the last few months the email and editor enhancements being rolled out - these are awesome, but they are just better way of doing things that already exist in TT. I would like to hear that there is some prioritization being done to other areas like reports where the functionality doesn’t exist right now and the data needed to produce those reports is already available. We’ve had a painful migration from TroopMaster to get all our scout data up-to-date in TroopTrack and we need some clarification knowing that features we used in TM (like Individual History Report or OA eligibility report) are coming soon. There’s some of this available right now, but its not complete/consolidated. The forum thread related to these topics have been open for a long time, and I didn’t see any indication this feature would be added anytime soon. We love TroopTrack so far, but we’re coming up to a point where we need some additional support for producing the reports that we depended on so much.

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Hi @ShaileshPatel,

I’ve given a summary roadmap in a few places, and Dave has a thread called “TroopTrack Labs” or something that he posts big things to.

Next time someone is available and we don’t have a big bug, I’m going to try to push the OA eligibility report through for development.

A bigger thing right now is changing the 2016 cub ranks so the adventures automatically apply to them.

We have a bug to feature ratio that we try to stick by when it comes to fixing and enhancing and sometimes the bigger projects become cumbersome and the developers work on smaller requests and you’ll see a big long list of smaller things in a product update.

So the emails thing is much bigger than a makeover. When it is fully released, it will allow users to RSVP from the email invites without logging in and it will allow you to receive emails from people not in your troop. Both HUGE features that we’ve been trying to finish and release for a long time. The delays with the Rails 5 upgrade pushed all of that back, but we are starting to get back on track now.

With the emails feature comes the membership resolver. Next we will want to apply that to events to eliminate the duplicate invites.

Another big picture thing we are working on is changing the infrastructure to be more efficient. This means you will be able to make a change and it will instantly change everywhere. If you are on a page and someone else is on that same page, you will be able to make a change and it will instantly occur without having to refresh for the other user. We also envision giving users a csv format and allowing you to upload equipment, users, library, badge lists, etc. on your own. We also think it would be cool to have a super admin “back end” where you could look at most pages like a spreadsheet and enter info that way, too.

Allowing users to handle their own troop transfers is one we’ve been pondering, too. We also would like to put in an activity log that tracks everything for every user (ie. user x marked scout y’s wolf badge as complete on this date at this time).

So between all of these bigger, long term projects, we work on getting other things done too. Sometimes we have to stop everything to fix a bug and that pushes us behind schedule, but we are working hard on it.

What specific reports aren’t working? If we know about it, I’ll put this ticket on the request. If not, I’ll make a new request for it.

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Matt - we saw the OA Eligiblity Report in the latest release - thanks!

Another report that would be nice is to get a consolidated Individual History Report, as what TroopMaster has. It contains a combination of all the following individual reports that are available in TroopTrack:

  1. “My Progress Report”, 2. “Detailed Report” and 3. “Board of Review Worksheet” all from User->Achievements
    "Detailed Report".
    In addition, add the data for OA achievement to the same report. This consolidatde report was called the “Individual History Report”. It would be great if this can be added, the data seems to be there. Let me know if you want a sample of the report we have been using from TroopMaster.

Thanks much!

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Sounds like a great suggestion, my troop could really use that righty away!