State of the community / your voice matters

General
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Dear Backstage Community :heart:

Let‘s talk about how we are all doing here and what y‘all would like to see going forward within this community and beyond. We would love to have an open discussion with you all :hugs:.

Keep in mind: this is about our community here and not about Polyend or their gear directly.

State of Moderation

Firstly, how do you feel about the moderators? Do you feel they do a decent job? Are there things they could do better?

For that here‘s a small poll:

  • Mods are doing great
  • Mods are decent
  • Mods could do better
  • Mods are the worst
0 voters

Make sure to leave a comment with any feedback you want to provide (if you got any).

State of the Forum

How do you feel about this forum in general? Are there things you‘d like to see here more often? Tips, Tutorials, other types of content? Are there things that annoy you? Functionality that is missing or driving you insane?

We invite you to leave a comment

We‘d really love to have a honest discussion so we can improve and help grow this community :blush: . So feel free to comment below with anything that is on your mind. May it be ideas, feedback, critique - you name it.

5 Likes
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I have to say that I love this community here and the wealth of knowledge everyone shares. Polyend as a whole has completely help find my musical voice. Coming from the ambient guitar community, it was starting to get stale for me and I wanted something I could be inspired with on the go. I found the Tracker Mini and from then on I was hooked. Then came the OG tracker, then the Synth, These are my main instruments now sprinkled with a couple other elements. Even though I use them for ambient music, I still watch all the videos of other ways others utilize them in other genres. So personally it would be cool to see a section for tips and tutorials. We have some great community members here that have things on YouTube that have been instrumental to my progress.
I would also like to add that I know we get anxious for new updates but I also know that these things take time and you are just making sure it comes out right and the fact that some ideas the community has requested has been implemented already is just so cool to see in a company.
Thanks to all you mods for putting up with us :sweat_smile: and thanks to all you community members who share your knowledge and music!

10 Likes
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I really enjoy seeing the videos, as @keeping.pma said it’s a great source of inspiration even if it’s not the same genre as I myself work on. I also learned a lot from the few projects that were shared by loading them up and seeing how things where arranged or how effects were used. I think it’s easy to get stuck in my workflow and completely miss out on how some effect or feature could help. So sometimes even feature requests in that regard are useful because people discuss workarounds which sometimes lead to cool tricks. I wish there was more discussions on how to use certain features or deep dives, but I’m also not creating posts and asking questions like that at the moment (if I did I’m sure there would be answers) so I can blame myself for that.

Functionality wise I think the forms work pretty well, I only have a tracker mini, so I might look at a synth thread but usually don’t follow the synth/play/pedals topics and I can easily enough mute the less constructive threads. Keeps the volume of posts to follow manageable :slight_smile: and allows me to focus on the content relevant to me.

On the moderation, I can’t speak for it all but I was involved in one thread which lead to a bug report once reproduced. The mods were helpful, responsive and active in reproducing the issue and refining what ended as a bug report (which is time consuming). I think it’s good they try to keep the conversations constructive while still letting people speak up whether they are happy or not.

3 Likes
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Being short and to the point, I appreciate what the team are doing, I feel they are perfectly reasonable in their approach.

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Everything seems fine to me! Anytime I had an issue related to the forum or a bug or something, the mods seem to be very helpful!

I do wish the place was a little less confusing sometimes. Sometimes im not sure where a section is or where to put something etc.. Then sometimes it gets changed and I’m confused again haha. Either way I just bother @Sandroid on discord and slap him around a little until he obeys me and does it for me :stuck_out_tongue: lol

1 Like
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Would love to see a section dedicated to tips and tutorials. One for Official Polyend videos and one for those from the community.

Share your tunes. Broken out into gear category that people use for their tunes.

Moderators doing a great job. How you have the patience and maintain your composure is beyond me.

Thank you.

6 Likes
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I like backstage. I know if I have a question or a suggestion, there is a place that people will listen and give feedback.

4 Likes
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Ok I have a forum complaint. Voting limits suck lol. We should be allowed more votes then given. So I am out of votes, meaning I can’t vote on anything else for the rest of my life on here unless I remove a vote from somewhere else etc.. I don’t find that fair lol.

We should have some sort of refresh system or monthly allotment of votes or something, because the system now doesn’t seem very nice! :stuck_out_tongue:

In my world I don’t understand why we can’t just have unlimited votes? Set blocks or limits where we can only vote once per feature request, but don’t limit our vote counts!

1 Like
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On the passionate side, I can get totally get where you’re coming from, but you have to understand just by how a voting system works, unlimited votes just makes a voting system moot. If everyone can vote on anything, then where is the value in the vote in the first place?

I could see maybe a world in the future where a certain amount of badges or achievements on Backstage could grant some votes. Just thinking out loud as a member, not as a mod :slight_smile:

3 Likes
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From the perspective of a user myself, i totally get ya. I‘d love to vote on everything as well :joy:.

But as @Dann said: limited votes help to put focus on features that really matter to users. Maybe we could raise the current general limit to 20 instead of 15 in the future. Curious to hear what people think about this.

I actually really like the idea of an extra-votes reward-system for users through contributions/badges, likes, whatever they do to help the community.

I‘ve had a quick look and i can tell you that it is not something that is built into the Discourse Voting System. But.. that doesn‘t mean we can’t bend it to our will :smirking_face:.

I’ve written this down as a possible future improvement, along the other things people have shared :writing_hand:

Thank you all who have shared feedback so far - keep it coming :hugs:

3 Likes
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The smaller the number of votes, the closer we are to understand the constrained reality of the Polyend dev team.

Also, tactical vote works here too. If you have 15 votes and 5 of them are for wishes in the top tier, maybe you can remove them (small impact) and reassign them to wishes that are about to cross the threshold for review by the dev team (big impact).

2 Likes
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Overall is a pleasant and helpful community, albeit a bit small, and from what I can see the moderators are doing a good job supporting the community and keeping the dialog civil.

For collecting information (rather than of public signalling) it might be helpful to keep it hidden who voted for what, it is my experience that people tend to hold back with critical feedback when they feel exposed, and especially so when it’s other members of the community people who are being criticised through a vote.

There’s a switch in the Build Poll dialog for that:

image

Personally I also find the option “Mods are the worst” less than helpful, a vote here contains is little information apart from an expression of frustration.

True. Maybe it’s even better to limit the votes to 5 instead of 15. That makes each individual vote a more valuable expression of people’s consideration.

I think one substantial challenge is that we have al large number of requests (e.g. 90 open wishes for Synth ATM), some of which might be rather small (add resonance as destination to the mod matrix, or add MIDI control for mixer or macros),and others are potentially huge (a new engine, or also a randomizer done well often requires lots of iteration over GUIs and constraints). Currently we neither have a process for even closing requests that habe been implemented, nor for checking and integrating stuff to keep that pile manageable somehow, we just dump more stuff on top of it.

A smaller number of votes might encourage people to go through all those requests before voting, and maybe even start tidying things up a bit.

That’s a can of worms right there, not only because it binds developer resources (somebody has to implement that technically, and somebody needs to make and evolve the rules how to award these votes), and a reward system will bring discussion, discontent and ultimately different classes of users. I’d rather avoid all that, given Polyend will choose independently which wishes to implement anyway.

I’d like all known bugs to show up in the bug tracker here, that would include confirmed bugs reported to directly to support (i.e. support would need to add an entry in that case).

I spent a lot of time yesterday figuring out what’s up with the Envelope mod targets, only to discover that this is an acknowledged bug.

With more than 100 logged bugs (over all devices) it also might make sense to extend the voting to bugs.

3 Likes
16

This is my bad! I actually thought the same thing earlier today and wanted to change it, but apparently you can‘t anymore once the poll is running. :laughing:

If people are willing to participate once more, i would have to create a new poll that is anonymous.

Implementation would be done by me, so it‘s outside developer resources and doesn‘t take away development time from the core Polyend team :blush:

But you make a very good point about it creating a user class system. That indeed is not something i‘d be a fan of either.

Since this is something that the Polyend Team would have to do themselfs or communicate to us moderators i don‘t know if it is viable or too time consuming. But that‘s definitely something that could be discussed.

This is a very good suggestion!

2 Likes
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the mods are doing everything well, we all just really want more news from the development team, especially on trackers and play+. I don’t want to think that these products have been abandoned. I want the simplest changes for stable operation with my devices!

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I don’t think it does? I think what makes the entire system moot is that once you’re out of votes, that you can’t vote anymore for the entire time you’re a member of this forum and that in order to vote again you must remove a vote of yours from something else you voted for etc. To me that just sounds weird and odd. :stuck_out_tongue:

I mean now I have to remove votes from something I voted for and wanted… So taking away from that just to put it somewhere else when i think all my votes matter lol.

Imagine someone that has a few polyend devices and love them, yet they can’t vote anymore because their very limited votes are stretched across all devices and now they can’t vote anymore.

I guess we could always just leave a comment saying how we like something instead, since that seems to be the only way we can tell someone we like something when we’re out of votes.

I’ll go back to the old school ways of doing +1 :smiley:

I just think a better system is needed but that is just my opinion!

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Do you think so? A very bad suggestion i think, all bugs have to be adressed. Everyone uses devices differentely and experiences bugs that others dont run into. “Do you want to preview your effects or change polyphony without killing the envelope?”
Sorry but this is bullshit.

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Well of course i agree that all bugs should be adressed, but being able to add a +1 (so to speak) could help prioritize them?

1 Like
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Given the fact that quite a few are logged for years now i disagree.

1 Like
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Fair. Well just so we are clear - just because i like an idea doesn‘t mean it gets implemented :wink: . This forum is a democracy after all.

2 Likes