Maybe I am just impatient, in fact I am sure I am, but it feels that wishes once accepted hang around for ages. I am sure Wikidot is working hard on them, and they will arrive reasonably soon, but as a user the lack of any feedback on progress is frustrating. Also it is difficult to know whether to plan to use a coming feature or to take the effort to work around its lack. Is there any chance of Wikidot publishing some idea of when they will be implemented?
As a developer myself I am aware of how difficult it is to commit to a timescale. Not only is the work itself uncertain, but the time to commit to it comes and goes as other more urgent work takes precedence for hours or days at a time. As soon as you say "it will be ready on Thursday", you can be sure to hit a snag, or to find a must-fix bug. Meanwhile users will be foaming at the mouth and telling you that you promised the feature was coming and they are losing vast sums of money because it isn't there.
So what I am looking for is not a cast-iron guarantee that the feature will be implemented by a given date, but some ball-park estimate of how advanced the work is and how long there is to wait for it.
Suggested implementation:
Four tags that can be attached to bugs and features, resulting in one of the following texts being displayed:
WikiDot expects that this feature will be available some time in the coming few days
WikiDot expects that this feature will be available some time in the coming few weeks
WikiDot expects that this feature will be available some time in the coming few months
WikiDot intends to implement this feature but no time-scale has been determined
Where a "few days" may be understood to mean "probably no more than three weeks", and a "few weeks" would similarly mean "probably no more than three months".
The tags should then be changed as work nears completion.
After some internal discussion, we decided:
Bugs will also be marked "work in progress" from time to time (when bug requires more than a while to fix or when bug is fixed but waits for internal testing, which can take some time for some sophisticated things).
I hope it'll be much cleaner what's going on with bugs and wishes with these rules.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
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Not sure if this is completed yet… rurwin, are you happy with how things are now?
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server
I had assumed this was closed. I have no desire to argue against a decision that the Wikidot staff took with all due care. So I am as happy as I expect to get ;-)
On the other hand, since it's still open, it's probably a good time to offer a critique of the system Gabrys introduced above:
Generally, it seems to be working as specified, but there are still items staying in the "planned" state for many months without change.
The former should be a relatively quick fix, whereas the latter would probably be very complex, so there is no way for us mere mortals to guess how long a wish is going to remain accepted but unimplemented. Marking a wish as "planned" is a good way to get us to shut up about it, so it helps Wikidot. ;-) But it does not help us as much.
It would be nice to have an extra category "accepted", so we can see when a wish is just a nice idea for the indefinite future, and when it is definitely going to be implemented in the short to medium term. Let "planned" mean what it says — someone has been told to implement it, and will be frowned on if they don't do so in a timely manner.
Hmm. Not sure whether I agree with adding another tag - in theory it's a good idea, but in reality I think it may just add to the complexity of the site and means people need to remember the meaning of an additional status for bugs/wishes, without much of a benefit.
Assuming that Wikidot has every intention of implementing those wishes as soon as they have a chance (i.e. when there aren't many critical bugs to fix), I personally have no issues with the current list of tags.
But if some wishes are going to consistently hang around for 12 or even 24 months after they are marked as accepted/planned, then perhaps another tag is worth having to indicate this, as you suggested.
Edit: Based on Michal's comment on wish:222, it seems like this would be a good candidate for that "implemented sometime in the next 2 years" tag.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server