Why we won't implement your suggestion

[kgroneman]

Catchy thread title eh? This is more to inform you why we MAY not implement your suggestion(s).

First, let's be clear that your suggestions are VERY welcome and often suggestions help us improve the forums. There are a lot of very good suggestions that don't get implemented however, and this is an attempt at an explanation as to why.

We've chosen to implement vBulletin (http) and Typhoon (NNTP) software for these forums. Most of the suggestions received are for the web interface so would impact vBulletin. You also need to know that the servers reside in the Novell Data Center which has many benefits such as fail over, disaster recovery, monitoring etc. but it severely limits who has access to test and implement changes.

vBulletin issues sofware updates regularly....once every one or two months. When these updates are installed, it will look at the template files (the "style" or look and feel) and if they haven't been customized, it will update them. If they have been customized, it won't update them but tell us to do them manually. One "style" is made of many template files. To update the "openSUSE Default" style (customized) takes 4-8 man hours for a relatively minor update and 36-48 hours for a major update. Human resource to do these updates is very limited so we want to have as little customization as we can get away with. Human resource to build and implement additional functionality into the system is almost non-existant.

The bottom line is if we get suggestions that are easy to implement with little customization we're more likely to do them than suggestions that require some developement and/or require additional major modifications to our templates......even if they are really, really, really, really good suggestions.

Anyway....there you have it. I hope it doesn't discourage you from making those good suggestions because sometimes we can find a good hack addition to vBulletin that we can install or otherwise find some way to do it without headaches.

Kim,


This is an automated response but we appreciate your feedback. Staff
takes all suggestions and comments seriously. While we can't
guarantee every suggestion or comment will result in forums changes,
we give each one consideration.

heh! seems they may or may not take your "suggestion" Kim..

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goldie