What’s the status of the Feature Requests section?
It predates WTH and has always served as a place where people express their “WTH” by suggesting new and improved ways of doing things.
More importantly, what is the magic that drew developers to address issues raised in WTH but Feature Requests is, comparatively speaking, ignored? Was it the more prominent marketing of the ‘limited time offer’ of WTH? Whatever it was, Feature Requests could benefit from the same treatment. There are many excellent WTH’s languishing in there.
Yeah maybe, that is what we are going to find out now I guess… One advantage of doing the WTH during Hacktoberfest, is to get a better/more dynamic interaction between developers and WTH reporters in the same month.
I guess to put it simply, WTH was a very direct way of asking your customer base what the want to see. And then you want on and proved that it wasn’t just lip service by actually fixing their gripes. It was refreshing to see that from a project.
And I do agree with another commenter, in that I believe you should hold the WTH fore hacktoberfest. That gives people time to flesh out the votes before the developers get started on stuff. It might be worthwhile to have a system where people can reopen the forum topics during hacktoberfest to reopen the dialog with the devs.
Honestly, I can’t think of much to improve on the process. It was awesome. But you guys have made so many right decisions I would trust your judgement if you decided to hold both at the same time. Go with your gut.
Well, we thought of that. The forums is closed for new WTH suggestions. But existing WTH topics can still be replied on and being discussed. This is especially helpful for things being addressed in the future (e.g., Hacktoberfest) or still in progress.
Absolutely AMAZING work here guys, thank you so much for such an amazingly powerful home automation tool! It’s been such a fun year since I discovered HA
Understood it’s a pickle and there’s nothing owed to even the popular vote, but has this at least been discussed or is there an ultimate solution that lies in the years ahead?
They have far more in common than in differences. The original post identified the difference as “not for requesting new integrations”.
“I really want this new integration to be implemented, so I can use my devices. Is this the right place for it?”
No, this event is not for requesting new device or services integrations. Please use the “Feature Requests” forum category instead.
The key question remains, what attracted developers to address so many WTH issues in such a short time when, in comparison, Feature Requests collect dust?
My theory is that its success was due to officially promoting it as a place where one could vent one’s peeves for a limited time. In a way, https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/ for Home Assistant.
This is in contrast to Feature Requests which gets no promotion (certainly nothing like what WTH did), is not framed as a place to complain, and its availability has no time limit.
Perhaps Feature Requests could benefit from some heightened marketing. Maybe a biannual, or even quarterly, promotion that calls developers to ‘cull the herd’ in Feature Requests. Whatever the ‘bump’ in fulfilled requests, would be worth the small promotional effort.
There is a big difference in focus. Furthermore, it allowed for annoyances/bugs, which are in general not really feature requests. Lastly recent content, things that matter now, as top of mind stuff from everybody. The contents of the WTH category is really hardly comparable to the feature requests category. Sure, some overlap is there, nobody denies that.
As for developer focus, it is an open source project, it relies on people willing to contribute. Sure, doing a month like this motivates the whole community, which is part of the goal. Similar to what Hacktoberfest does as well.
The same promotion directed at Feature Requests could spur a similar uptick in contributions.
As for WTH vs Feature Requests, I recognized several gripes in WTH that were already long-standing Feature Requests (need to restart for changes, Automation Editor deficiencies, stunted expand in Template Sensors, etc). Nevertheless, they sat there unaddressed for ages whereas their WTH equivalents were resolved ASAP. That’s impressive and the ‘magic’ responsible for this is valuable. All I’m suggesting is to consider using some of the same magic to help whittle down Feature Requests.
True, a promotion loses its impact if it occurs too frequently. All I’m suggesting is that it be tried at least once for Feature Requests. For example, next Valentine’s Day as a ‘Show your Love’ for Home Assistant … by fulfilling a Feature Request. Or something along those lines.
Another difference between the “Month of WTH” and “Feature Requests” section is that often the WTH posts focused on core parts of the way HA looks, works, and feels which all developers can work on (given the skill), and the Feature Requests often require the developer own a specific piece of hardware, account on a cloud service, live in a specific country, or other requirements that raise the bar for being able to work on them.
Also that WTH posts often focused on things that everyone can benefit from, where as feature requests would only benefit those who wanted to use that specific component.
I’m not saying that it’s any less of a reason to work on them, just thinking of reasons they often get less traction and receive less developer love.
Those state triggers on reboot cause automations to occur in my case. They need to change the way they handle initialization of previous states versus setting a new state at boot time. Currently at boot time all states appear to be discovered and set and events triggered, instead of discovered, compared to previous, and then set and events triggeredif required.
