Forum Suggestion for People Making Shotcut Suggestions

You should NOT be able to make a Shotcut software suggestion if that is your very first post on the forum. You should need to accumulate at least 5 posts before you can suggest a functionality. Similar to some Reddit posts where you would first need to gain karma points before you can make a post.

Most of those suggestions derive from people who never even took the time to research or play around the tool first. They literally downloaded and installed then next move is post a suggestion…“this button should be on the left because I can’t find it.”

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I can limit a category to something called a trust level. New members are at trust level 0. You need to be at trust level 2 to edit in the #docs category. Currently, trust level 1 requires:

  • 5 topics entered (created?)
  • 30 posts read
  • 10 minutes spent reading
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Whatever standard you want to set. You have to EARN the right to suggest a functionality after understanding how the ecosystem work.

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I agree. Good suggestion. Especially considering that many times newbies make suggestions that are already on the roadmap.

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I agree. Knowing the product and checking what Shotcut can do is prior to requesting a feature that has been seen in other software or elsewhere.

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+1
I agree too

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I think it’s a minimum

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In lieu of the reading part, I would put at least visited one of these pages (How Tos, Tutorials, FAQ, Features, etc.)

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The forum software does not have that level of control.

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Ah. OK the 10 minute thing…

OK, this is implemented now as well as template text that requests to read the road map or like an existing suggestion.

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Good idea! I like it, too.

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It looks like I’m still seeing first-timers making software suggestions

It is working; there are different ways to achieve trust level 1. I do not have total control over that logic, and neither do I want to be onerous. To be honest, I created the suggestions category mainly so I could more easily ignore those posts.

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I saw some suggestions too, but noticed they were filing them under every category except Suggestions. Not sure what can be done to stop that.

OK lol

I’ll just skip over them

It is easy for Dan and I to recategorize those. Feel free to flag any that I don’t notice.

If you are interested/motivated to extract value from those suggestion posts, there is often opportunity to engage the new user and try to find out their specific use case. They might suggest “Please add feature X like program Y has”. But if you ask what specifically they need to accomplish, we might find out that they only need a subset of the feature. Or the goal can be accomplished some other way.

As a developer, I often value these “use case” conversations because it helps me understand what the real needs are.

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