The month of 'What the Heck?!'

Blog
1

Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!”

Home Assistant is now almost around for 7 years! During that time, it has grown into a big project, beloved by many of you. However, as the project grew, some things might not have turned out the way it should be, are missing or maybe even started annoying you. That is what this month is about.

We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub might be a steep hill. You’ll need a GitHub account, report an issue following the issue templates using Markdown and the report itself needs to be written in a way a developer can work with it. Furthermore, we use our issue tracker for tracking actual issues and bugs; not small feature requests or annoyances.

While this is a common and reasonable process to collect, track and process bugs, our issue tracking process might not be the ideal way to learn about annoyances or small tweaks and improvements that can make us all enjoy Home Assistant even more.

In May, of this year, the Ruby on Rails project had a similar month, which we have enjoyed watching. Now, we are going to do something similar.

Today, we have opened up a Community Forum category as a safe, lower barrier place to tell about your Home Assistant “What the heck?!” moments, and more importantly, discuss and vote on topics your fellow users have brought up.

Frenck recently tried something similar for Home Assistant on Twitter, by asking:

Enlighten me 💡

The whole community would celebrate and be shedding happy tears of joy, if this tiny little thing was added to @home_assistant...

— Franck Nijhof (@Frenck) July 21, 2020

The responses to that question were amazing! Full of inspiration, recognition of stuff that annoyed us as well, but also some really really good suggestions. And this is not just about new tiny little things, examples may include:

  • I’d love to see some Home Assistant sensors with things like: The total automations, triggers processed this hour, the total number of integrations, entities, number of events fired.
  • I want to be able to upload a backup on the frontend on the first install.
  • Maybe you are annoyed by some logs that you need to refresh and scroll to see updates?
  • You have a lot of template entities that all do the same thing and maybe could be handled by Home Assistant automatically.
  • Always need a workaround to automate something the way you like and really wished Home Assistant provided a better trigger/condition for it?

These are the things we are looking for, the things we should share this month.

We are really looking forward to all the stuff that will be brought up! This will be interesting!

Join us on the forums!

So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?

FAQ

  • “I have multiple things! Should I put all my stuff in a single topic?!”

    No, please create multiple, smaller topics. Each topic can be voted on, picked up and resolved. Having multiple things stacked in a single forum topic, makes resolving, discussing and voting on them hard. There is no limitation on how many things one can suggest this month.

  • “Is everything reported going to be fixed/addressed?”

    There is no guarantee that will happen. The goal is to lower the barrier to reporting things for one month. Home Assistant still relies on contributors to address or improve the project. However, we do think collecting feedback this way can tremendously help with the upcoming Hacktoberfest.

  • “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.

  • “I’ve found a bug and am comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report my issue now?”

    If you are comfortable with using GitHub, please, by all means, file an issue report on GitHub.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/08/18/the-month-of-what-the-heck/
2

Great idea! I have two things that are frustrating to me.

Edit: on @aidbish’s suggestion I’ve moved them to the proper subforum.

3

maybe put them in topics in the what the heck forum

4

Kinda misplaced here :slight_smile:

Please read the blog

5

You might want to bump the allowed new user topic count. I just hit the limit at 5 posts :frowning: And I still have more to offer.

6

They are refreshed daily. If you visit enough and gain trust in the community, more are granted to you.

7

…which is not blocked from participating. What the Heck!

3 Likes
8

Repetitive, again :slight_smile:

9

suprised your not blocked from here going on all the time

1 Like
10

In fairness though, it’s hard for this project to continue to claim to be community driven when every time a member of the community disagrees with a dev they get shouted down, threatened, abused, blocked or some combination. The environment here and on github is really toxic frankly, follow us and agree with everything we do or be silenced.

It’s especially frustrating when the url for the forum is community.home-assistant.io which implies that this is where one should come to be part of the community and have ones voice heard, but when large swathes of the forum all agree on something the dev team still won’t listen, and in fact state categorically that this forum does not represent the ‘community’.

I suppose really the thread should be "WTH is the point in having a month of WTH when nobody is really interested in end user opinions’.

On the more specific issue of our friend above, if one were continually told that the place for one’s discussion was github, but one was then not allowed to join the conversation there I could certainly see why that person would feel the need to protest it when the need arises, however ‘repetitive’ it may seem to those who aren’t in that position.

5 Likes
11

is this active policy? Must admit I have never heard or read about that on this community. Second, where can we find our credited trust level? Suppose for me personally that would probably be level 3, though level 2 detail ‘outside users to PMs making a group PM’ hasn’t ever happened yet, nor would I know if I was allowed to…

do we all get one of these little badges now showing our trust level? (horrific word btw) Id prefer ‘appreciation’ much better. More of a community word, than the top down authoritarian ‘trust’ which one is ‘granted’ or ‘promoted’ to…

12

It is not active policy, it is part of the forum software we are using: Discourse.

More information about Discourse and their level: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

13

image

14

haha, cool, I am a Member :wink: (and not a Regular…)

yes, thanks Franck, that’s the same link Petro showed. So it’s a system of forum software figures and algorithms, and Regular and Leader interpretations is it?

All fine by me tbh, as long as it doesn’t get to ‘toxic’ too often. Both sides.
Cheers!

15

It is a fairly basic trust based system that helps a bit fighting things like spam, but helps with things like moderation.

(for example, a user that is around a long time, has a high trust and a track record of flagging that mods tend to agree with, are handled differently).

But, in general, it doesn’t effect anybody in their daily use. Only brand new accounts are a bit more limited (just for the spam protection reason), however, even those will not notice in general.

16

Frankly, my moderation experience on other forums is that a suspension for repeated or serious infractions is far better than a ban. Mr @orange-assistant should be allowed back on github IMHO. One assumes that a suspension will teach the “lesson”, and that the user will be able to return to providing useful input.

But @orange-assistant, I can say that mentioning your github ban at every damn occasion is not the way back in. Just sayin’.

17

My contribution:
Why the heck can’t I delete nonexistent devices from integrations like Smartthings?
I have lots of old residual devices, yet all my entities in that integration are correct. So I’ll have a situation with 10 entities and 25 devices, where 15 of those devices don’t actually exist.

18

Welcome back, your contribution is already a post. To vote for it, visit