2020 Forums Wishlist/Feature Request Thread

Question

Created Jun ’20

Replies 8

Boosts 1

Views 1.7k

Participants 8

We are excited to see the new forums! Here is an evolving list of feature requests and wishes. (Please post additional requests on this thread)

Feature Requests

Parse HTML in summaries
- Example: Display > instead of >
Tag list
Sort results by most recent, most votes, most relevant.
List of most recent posts globally. When a developer wants to kill some time, it would be nice to see what people are asking. Similar features exist on StackOverflow and HackerNews.
Ability to see all of your responses. We can currently see a count, but not the actual posts. It would be nice to know if someone answered a followup.
Ability to rename profile.
Signatures
Polls

Political Requests

Users need to be able to criticize or vent about Apple or Apple products without the fear of getting their developer accounts banned. If Apple can clarify that what developers say on the forums will not negatively effect their apps or company's apps, it will go a long way towards moving the conversation from independent forums/SO/slacks and back to the official forums.
Year-round Apple Engineer engagement. The forums will die/lose respect if we only get serious engagement a few weeks in June.

Thank you Apple, I hope these Forums become an amazing resource!

Boost

Answer 1

MarcoCarnevali OP

Jun ’20

Hello, I think the best place to send Apple feedbacks is through their dedicated website: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/welcome
Thank you and I agree with what you are suggesting!

2

Answer 2

Maci OP

Jun ’20

Actually, it is suggested to use the feedback assistant or a post on this forum for feedback. We only have to add "Forums Feedback" as a tag so everything is fine with this thread.

Now to the suggestions by @shanecowherd. I especially agree with point 3, 4 and 5.
The tag list named in point 2 can be found here.

Now to my wishes:

Mail notification when somebody replies to your question
This forum embed in the Apple Developer app

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Answer 3

ahzzheng OP

Jun ’20

I would like to be able to edit my questions (there's no button)! And your profile page is rarely refreshed -- I posted a couple questions yesterday and so far only the first one has shown up. It would also be nice to see the upvote/downvote count.

Some links are restricted too. There seems to be a whitelist -- I can't link to Hacking With Swift or raw.github.com.

This URL can't be included in your post. Please remove it to continue.

And for some reason, links that include '%' get an auto-generated '25' after each of them. For example:
https://github.com/zjohnzheng/DeveloperAssets/blob/master/Shot%202020-06-19%20at%201.09.00%20PM.png
when pressed, results in a 404.

That's because the Forums added '25' in front of every '%'.
https://github.com/zjohnzheng/DeveloperAssets/blob/master/Shot%25202020-06-19%2520at%25201.09.00%2520PM.png

The search functionality is also pretty bad. I second your request of sorting results "by most recent, most votes, most relevant."

3

Answer 4

ahzzheng OP

Jun ’20

Update: I'm now able to edit a post that I made 10 minutes ago, but I still can't edit those published before that.

Edit: The Forums Support says:

You can edit any content that you’ve authored for up to one hour after posting.

2

Answer 5

john daniel OP

Jun ’20

List of most recent posts globally. When a developer wants to kill some time, it would be nice to see what people are asking.

These forums are based on the Apple Support Communities forums, at least from a technical perspective. Apple Support Communities has a "Subscriptions" feature that would really be useful here.

Ability to see all of your responses. We can currently see a count, but not the actual posts. It would be nice to know if someone answered a followup.

Apple Support Communities supports this too, albeit a bit awkwardly.

Signatures

These can be easily abused by spammers.

Polls

That's a can-o-worms. Not going to happen.

Users need to be able to criticize or vent about Apple or Apple products

You've got the rest of the internet for that. Can't we have just one safe space where we can talk code and tech without politics?

Year-round Apple Engineer engagement. The forums will die/lose respect if we only get serious engagement a few weeks in June.

Apple's Developer forums have always had engagement from Apple engineers. And that was when the forums were pretty much a wasteland. If more real developers used the forums as a resource, then I'm sure Apple will devote even more support resources to them.

2

Answer 6

rnikander OP

Jun ’20

It would be good to have a few search operators like StackOverflow. Besides dates (which has already been mentioned) it's nice to search for things with or without answers. If you want to help others and answer questions, you can say, for example, "Show me questions about Swift in the last year with no accepted answer". Something like:

[Swift] created:2019-2020 accepted:no

1

Answer 7

hiroakit OP

Jun ’20

Dear shanecowherd,

Thank you for making this thread.
The following feature also I would want it.

Sort results by most recent, most votes, most relevant.

I think that it is helpful for some people to just specify in the help page how topics are arranged.
Finally, i hope this forum thrives.

2

Answer 8

RandomDSdevel OP

Jun ’20

I'd like to be able to follow threads to get on-forum notifications about new replies to them. This should also allow users to say in their account settings that they want posting to a thread to automatically follow that same thread. (Maybe the latter's already implicit, though…?)

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