New Dropbox Features | Hacker News Reader

New Dropbox Features

blog.dropbox.com

44 pointsjmonegro24 comments

Sounds great, except that there's 10+ pages (I gave up clicking next) of submissions, making the votes heavily skewed to anything that has already been voted into the first page. I suppose if I wanted a specific feature I would search for it and then vote for it, which is fine this way, but somehow I suspect a lot of people are just going to me-too vote on something they hadn't thought of wanting, even though some submission on page 50 is something they would much rather see implemented first.

I love how dropbox let's any user add software they developed to work with dropbox, to the "AddOns" section of the wiki:

http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons

I'm working on a printer queue right now that I'm going to link to up there.

Waiting for it..!

Any chance Votebox could be open-sourced? I'd love to use it on my own projects.

And yes, I've used Uservoice. Not a fan, personally.

How about IdeaTorrent (http://www.ideatorrent.org/)? As a casual user of http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ I've been pretty happy with it.

What about UserVoice weren't you a fan of?

- Rich@UserVoice

This is exactly why one should always be mindful of what one says here about software one uses. Many of those software developers are lurking here in the shadows and might take offense - Or at least be curious and want to help or correct a mistake.

Why is this a bad thing? Seems like developers should jump at the chance for honest feedback.

You have to be mindful of what you say anywhere public. Backtype alerts are the feedback junkie's friend.

What are backtype alerts?

http://www.backtype.com/

My mum was a newspaper journalist in a city. It was a small place, but a regional center. So lots of government offices, etc.

Given she worked in print and they didn't print her photo on bylines, the average joe didn't know what she looked like. More than once she got a juicy lead on a story just be overhearing people talking about work when they were in queues at the grocery store or bank.

Also, I once took a seat on a train in a group of four seats. 3 guys in suits came and took the other seats, and then started having a conversation about financial details of a construction project for Company X. After about 15 minutes I said "Look, sorry. I can't let you talk about this any more. I work for Company X."

They didn't get the contract.

Serves them right. Just because I dress like a tramp doesn't mean that I don't have a job where I know the people who'll get your multi-million dollar contract cancelled for being careless with confidential details.

Hey Rich,

My silliest nitpick is commenting on ideas. It's chronologically backwards. New comments show up at the top, but the commenting form is at the bottom.

But more to it's core, I don't like how votes are rationed. If the management doesn't keep on top of ideas or if the forum is too active, then users have to start compromising their opinions. It feels unfair to users that want to contribute but can't. I'm not saying I would accept how Votebox works without modification, but I do like how votes are kept under control without it feeling like I can't really contribute past a certain point.

You just gave me an idea

Dreamhost has used something like this for a while now. It works well, I feel.

Votebox seems to be an innovative concept, seems to be much better than systems used by for example Google communicating with users/developers. I'm speaking from experience as a developer, it would be nice to see this concept applied to API development/feature requests.

Also, nice use of the word janky.

It's sort of a sparse, more formal takeoff on meta.stackoverflow.com.

For that analogy to work at all, votebox's UI would have to be a set of shared files that are automatically synced to your filesystem, with a primitive online file browser UI, but only local editing. It would also have to be a completely independent site, with different user accounts and separate quota.

You clearly took my analogy too far. I was referring to the concept of a closely-knit system of user feedback and voting, not a clone of the site directed toward the purpose of meta-discussion.

Hey, it's been done since IdeaStorm (and it's the whole point of uservoice), but it's always a nice idea. The problem with Votebox is that the search is terrible.

I'm sure the things I want (propogate folder renames across all users/machines and the ability to change permissions on nested subfolders to make them private/restricted to only certain users) are in there, somewhere, but I couldn't find them no matter what combination of phrases I could think of.

Um, if by "innovative concept" you mean "almost exact ripoff of uservoice", then yes, I totally agree.

It is a little cleaner and much closer to the rest of dropbox's site than they could get uservoice. I'll be interested to see if they regret reinventing the wheel and thus having to spend time solving problems uservoice has already solved.

There are obviously some benefits (same login as the main site, they can implement any feature they want, looks more like the rest of dropbox)

It isn't reinventing the wheel if you do it better.

This is more like refining an octagon into a wheel without having to pay rights usage.

Well yeah, but they're still doing the same thing, which means that there are problems that uservoice has already solved that dropbox will have to deal with on its own.

For example, someone said that the search is really bad. Uservoice probably has invested a fair amount of time into searching liberally enough that it doesn't throw out tickets that do match what the user is asking for.

I don't know if it's been there before uservoice (I think so), but Dreamhost has this same thing on it's feature request area. You have a number of votes, can see all the requests, vote, and get them back once/when the feature you asked for is implemented.

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