In Feature Upvote votes on your feedback board now slowly lose value over time.
(This is optional, and not enabled automatically for existing feedback boards.)
Why, you ask?
Because old backlog items are an anchor around your neck.
You really should delete them, but you don’t because you are scared / worried / cautious / busy.
So instead we’ll make sure your old backlog items automatically lose value and slide down your backlog. Out of sight, out of mind.
Unless they keep getting more votes, that is.
But again, you ask: why?
Consider 2 popular feature requests:
- Feature A got 120 votes in a flurry of activity a year ago.
- Feature B regularly gets 10 votes per month.
With our old “all votes count as 1” system, these would both have a score of 120.
With our new “votes slowly lose value over time” system, Feature A has a score of 60 and Feature B has a score of 120.
Nobody has asked for Feature A in the last 12 months. It might have been something meme-driven, or based on some hype from a competitor, or simply irrelevant based on other changes in your product. Whatever the reason, if no-one is asking for it any more, building it is a bad decision.
Meanwhile, Feature B is important to your customers. You can tell from the steady stream of votes.
So Feature B should rank much higher. And now it does.
How to enable this?
This feature is not enabled for existing boards until you enable it yourself in your board’s Behaviour settings. But I think you should enable it.
Go to your Feature Upvote dashboard, go to your board’s Settings -> Behaviour, and set “Vote counts” to “Weighted scores”. Then click “Save Changes”.
Changing back to the old system
The actual total score is always maintained internally, so you can switch back and forwards between the two systems. Our CSV and Excel exports now contain both the “total votes” score and the “lose value over time” score.
Like maths?
You like maths and want to know the details? It’s an exponential decay with a half-life of 1 year, recalculated nightly.
A vote’s weighted value is: 0.5^(days since vote was created/365)
For a suggestion, we total the “decayed value” of each of its votes, and round the result to the nearest integer when displayed.