@elan said:
Would I call it one of the top-ten requested features between our customers, employees, and forum users? Probably not.
How do you know what your customers want? If they aren’t coming here to the forums to request features what avenue are you using to understand what the community really wants? This is what the Feature Requests forums is all about isn’t it? Are you relying on Facebook posts? Reddit comments? Where are the surveys or polls to support these assumptions you have?
If it’s one of the top 10 in the forums, with an assumed 1% of the entire community asking for it, wouldn’t you say that this could be scaled up fairly well to a large majority of the community. That’s how exit polls work… Granted, exit polls are not always accurate, but many times they NAIL it, too…
What use is the Feature Requests forum if it’s not an indicator of the features people want to see? Is it just there for a warm fuzzy for us that come to the forums? If so, that sure explains a lot to many of us here…
If people come to the forums looking for how to do a feature, and then find it’s not available, many of them would naturally go to a Feature Requests forum. (or are directed to them.) They would either make a request there or search for it and support an existing feature request. Some folks don’t even know these forums exist. They go to Facebook or Reddit or any of a slew of other similar types of social media to do their search/request.
You make claims that “we” don’t know what the entire Plex Community wants, but how do you know, if you aren’t asking the entire community for input? Or have you asked this elsewhere, but not of the people on the forums?
I really do think it’s time for a survey emailed out to all of Plex’s users. Leverage the 3rd party survey sites to get something comprehensive that you can ask several (4 or 5, maybe?) different pages worth of potential features, assigning a value of 1-10 for importance to the given user. Do you want ebooks over collections over desktop sync? Make sure each of the potential features has been asked at least 2 or 3 times, but ask them in a different mix of other potential competing features. This is the only way to KNOW what your users really want. Otherwise it’s just a guessing game. (One which many of the people in this thread think you are losing.)
You may very well find that Music Videos are super important to a few, but that a fully functional PMP is a much more important thing to many more people. Or that user groupings is the most desired of all potential features. Or HW acceleration… Or “fixing” things like Blacklists in filters and permissions… And this gives you an idea of where to start allocating development resources and time. It also engages the users in the development cycle. Right now, this is one of the biggest things missing. We have no visibility, and some of us think there’s simply nothing going on other than what the TEAM wants to have happen.
The only way you are ever going to know what features the users want means you are going to have to ask them. If only 10% of the community replies to this survey, well, at least you have an idea of what 10% of the users want to see, which is better than the claimed 1% from the forums.
A survey is only going to work, if you USE the data. It needs to be published, so respondents can see how their “pet” features compete against others, and allocating resources need to reflect the survey. Otherwise you just get more thread like this one in 6 months or a year, and we repeat the whole process.
We’ll see if what the users want is truly important to Plex as a whole, if we see a survey like this come out. With the answers we’ve gotten in this and past threads, I honestly don’t think a survey is likely to happen. Even with 10% responding I’m sure that wouldn’t be enough to justify a swing in the Team’s priorities.
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