Posting this under the heading it deserves: Request declined, with reasoning — what changed since Everything below is what sits behind that.
What changes if the standard account of Request declined is wrong? I ask because I have been treating it as settled and I noticed this week that I could not say why.
Working through the consequences rather than the evidence, since others here are better placed on the evidence.
I had read the opposite somewhere and cannot now find where, which tells me something.
Everything in post #3 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Modest request: remember my sort preference per category rather than globally. I want newest in announcements and most-replies in analytics, permanently.
Small request: let me filter Latest by whether I have read the topic. Unread exists as a tab and does not combine with anything else, so a busy category is either all of it or none.
I am confident about the direction and much less about the magnitude.
Feature request I expect to be refused, stated anyway: a private notes field on a topic, visible only to me. I keep those in a text file and the text file loses the link.
Post #4 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Request with a caveat attached: a compare view for two vendor pages side by side. The caveat is that it would encourage exactly the ranking-by-number reading the pages are written to discourage.
I read post #6 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Two things can be true about Request declined at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.
Worth separating two things that post #6 runs together.
That reframing is better than the original request and staff would consider it. Which is a good illustration of why these belong in public: the first version would have been declined and the third is worth building.
Fair. Then under the name, at a smaller size, permanently.
It is worth stating the boring hypothesis before the interesting one.
Coming back to post #9, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.
Requests for platform and documentation features, with the reasoning that justifies them. If you think the site would be better with a feature, suggest it with enough detail that it is actionable.
Somebody will have a better source than mine, and I hope they post it.
Post #13 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
Request from the analytics side: allow a table in a post to be marked as data rather than layout, so it can be copied without the formatting. Half the tables here are worth pasting into a spreadsheet.
Request with the use case rather than the feature. I frequently want every topic that cites a particular maintained document. At the moment I can find the document from the topic and not the reverse.
I have kept the units in throughout, for the obvious reason.
I had written a reply contradicting post #13 and deleted it. Here is what survived.
Community support: if other people support your request, they can reply with "+1" or "I would use that too". Widely-requested features are prioritised.
The arithmetic in post #17 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
Use case: explain why you think the feature would help. "I would use this to..." makes the request concrete.
Posting it because the silence on this was starting to look like agreement.
This follows post #18 rather than contradicting it.
Staff view: this is a good request and a larger one than it looks, because the citation is currently a link rather than a relationship. Recording it properly is the work, displaying it is trivial.
Understood. Thank you for being specific about the limits of it.
Request that would help newcomers more than regulars: show the subcategory description on hover in the category list. The names are terse and the descriptions are good.
I would hold that lightly until someone with a larger sample weighs in.
Feature request I expect to be refused, stated anyway: a private notes field on a topic, visible only to me. I keep those in a text file and the text file loses the link.
It reads as pedantry until the day it does not.
Picking up post #23: that is the part I would want checked first.
Request: an export of my own posts. Not for any dramatic reason — I want to search my own history offline, and site search is optimised for finding other people's material.
It is a small point and it changes the answer, which is an awkward combination.
Modest request: remember my sort preference per category rather than globally. I want newest in announcements and most-replies in analytics, permanently.
A partial answer, offered because a partial answer beats none.
Staff view: this is a good request and a larger one than it looks, because the citation is currently a link rather than a relationship. Recording it properly is the work, displaying it is trivial.
Request with the use case rather than the feature. I frequently want every topic that cites a particular maintained document. At the moment I can find the document from the topic and not the reverse.
Adding a source would improve this post and I do not have one to hand.
Request from the analytics side: allow a table in a post to be marked as data rather than layout, so it can be copied without the formatting. Half the tables here are worth pasting into a spreadsheet.
Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.