Hey all! I don’t post here often and tend to lurk. However, the more I have come to the forums and the feature request site to get an idea of the roadmap or to see which features are the most wanted and which have been acknowledged from Lightburn. I tend to fall into a pattern of finding many duplicates of the same feature requests, all with varying amounts of up votes and no responses from the developers.
For example, I pulled a few requests. When adding the upvotes of all of them (in which there are probably many more) it adds up to 94 upvotes. Which this request I would consider a smaller quality of life update and not a major update. I feel it would be beneficial to start a discussion on the state of the Fider feature request site and if it is actually helping. Those 94 upvotes are lost in between so many different posts it can be difficult to get a quick glance on how important it is to people.
Lightburn already has a github LightBurn Software (github.com) which provides issues/bugs/projects/task boards and allows for collaboration from community members. With this Lightburn can have members of the community who have been approved to help manage certain aspects and remove duplicates while linking to the “core” issues that should be used. Allowing one place for Lightburn staff to reply to and have a discussion about the implementation and if it is something they see as beneficial and receive feedback from the community.
(I can only submit 2 links because of my lurker status so in the pastebin is 12 different feature requests all for the same thing)
I love Lightburn and use it almost every day. I don’t want to come off as a complainer or that Lightburn isn’t great or their not doing a good job. It is and they are, but coming from a dev background I feel that fider is more of a hassle for them to go through, instead of a source of feedback and a location to show a possible roadmap of future updates. Fider is better than nothing, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the way features can be requested from my standpoint.
I thank the Lightburn team/staff for their work and their dedication to making working with lasers a great and easy experience!
I think this is part of the issue, the upvotes go into a sea of duplicate feature requests. This ends up not actually portraying to the developers what people may want. It also moves the discussion of the feature all over the place in many different threads making it difficult for anyone to follow, including the devs.
We do go through the feature requests and merge duplicates (which Fider provides a way to do, merging the votes as well).
The Git Repo you’re looking at is for our documentation only. As as a developer you’re likely comfortable with Git, but few regular users are.
We are a small dev team (roughly 5 and a half developers, as one of them is split between roles). One of those is me, and I have lots of demands on my time, one is in the middle of an intercontinental move, and one is still getting up to speed.
It’s simply not possible for us to accommodate every request. Often users ask for vague things and don’t provide enough detail for us to implement something, and when asked for clarification, they don’t respond. The most popular requests are massive amounts of work (IE, mobile/tablet app, shape nesting).
We also have to prioritize requests against bug fixes, user support, the things we already have in progress, as well as things we’ve committed to for vendors or existing customers.
If all of this sounds like excuses, you’re not wrong, but we do actually read the requests, and implement a lot of them. Anything simple often happens quickly, even if it has relatively few votes. Anything complicated is evaluated based on level of difficulty vs number of votes. The most recent additions based on user feedback were the material test wizard, slot/tab resizer, hotkey editor, rotating table marking for galvos, and the warp and distort functions.
Thanks for the reply @LightBurn! I appreciate the response and information when it comes to feature requests. I hope I didn’t come off that I think you guys aren’t working on things or aren’t busy. I appreciate all the work and effort being put into this product and know you guys are working hard!
I know developing can be a large balance between many different aspects. I guess I feel like it would be worth some time to potentially allow members of the community to organize requests and allow merging. Which would hopefully give the smaller team better focus on adding the requested features than clean up. I am not as familiar with Fider so do not know fully what is possible. However, I know there are many feedback services out there and maybe there is one that can better organize and fit the requests of Lightburn?
I also feel like having a project board of what is being worked on or what is in the “planned” list would help people understand that creating another feature request for it doesn’t help. It would also allow anyone who can merge to go through and merge to the core request on the project board (if available).
I understand no option is perfect but I do feel there is room for improvement when it comes to the feature requests. But ultimately it is whatever works best for you guys so no hard feelings! I was just wanting to bring up my opinion and if there is anything I can do to help out myself, feel free to let me know
