Forums / Ideas

I recently had an idea for improving RTM, and as I skimmed through the hundreds of forum posts describing dozens of times the same ideas over and over again, with most threads dead after the first comment, a thought struck me: there has to be a better way to do this.

There are several free issue tracking systems available, and any of them would help keep the problem reports and feature requests organized a lot better -- and isn't that the RTM way, keeping things organized. Issues could be commented and voted on by users, duplicate issues merged and redundant or invalid issues deleted. Users could easily see is their issue reported already, as the list of open issues would be shorter. This would greatly benefit both users of RTM, but even more so the developers, who could better keep track of what features users really like. Triaging bugs would take time but I guess more time is wasted going through the forum posts. And if the RTM staff is really sneaky they could just promote a few trusted pro users to do the triaging for them in exchange for a discount.

It might be that this post also simply gets buried under the flood of replicated ideas -- and this post may well be already posted by someone else -- but if you are reading this please let me know what you think.

Posted at 6:31am on April 18, 2011