How long should feature requests be open for before we should expect a response from a SolarWinds employee?

I can't see a forum to discuss Thwack and SolarWinds processes itself, apologies that this is the wrong place for it. (Maybe a feature request for that huh?)

Looking across all of the products there are so many feature requests that have been open for years with many, many votes on them.

Should there be a threshold that says over x amount of votes we will provide a response, much like the UK governments petition system.

Should there also be a time limit? Maybe 6 months, or a year? If no votes, or under x amount of votes, then there is an automatic decline of the request.

The tagline at the bottom of Thwack states:
"SolarWinds solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base in the THWACK® online community. More than 195,000 members are here to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly contribute to our product development process."

There are so many feature requests from people who have put a lot of thought in to how best to present their ideas, and also many people who agree with them they deserve official responses with explanations.

  • To the best of my knowledge there isn't an ETA for feature requests as such, you make a valid point but then I guess this is just one such platforms where SolarWinds might pick a few ideas/feature requests onto the drawing board and probably check its feasibility. There could be several other areas from where they pick them up be it like Customer feedback, SWUG, Bootcamp, UX sessions, their very own ideas (vendor) etc etc. Once its all collected it would go to the Product Owner and then I am sure they would have their own process, procedure, projects etc to get it rolling into a new release or version. 

    In the past on older Thwack portal when a feature request was implemented, portal moderator use to mark that particular feature request as IMPLEMENTED on Thwack, but then over a period of time a lot has changed. SolarWinds isn't anymore a small or mid sized firm, the expansion is massive and they are infact doing great. 

    I am sure thwack community managers will definitely help you if you would like to get involved and contribute more to this forum.

    Have a great day! 

  • Our Customer Support SolarWinds Manager told us they do look at the Feature Requests on Thwack, but then it is an internal discussion. When I questioned him about the long-term items in Thwack, he didn't have an answer. I'm building a HCO environment now and the amount of little stuff that should be fixed but isn't even on a timeline, is very weird and frustrating.

  • I've had a look through the HCO feature requests pages and not a single request has a status change on it. There are now 16 pages and a total of 77 requests, all "open for voting" status.
    According to the documentation for the forum, there is an expectation that these feature requests would get updated with different statuses when they have been looked at.
    Understanding Feature Request Statuses

    This means that none of the feature requests are being considered, which is a shame as there are some golden ideas on there.

       - Are you able to give us an idea as to whether we should still expect the statuses of requests to be updated?

  • I've moved this to the Command Central > Community Discussions as I feel it's the best place for this community/product wide discussion.

    Feature Requests on THWACK are one of the places our Product Managers are gleaning information about what our user base is looking to get added/adjusted in the products. A status not changing from "Open for Voting" doesn't indicate that they have not seen the feature request. 

    I'll share this with our product team to see if there's any additional information we can share on this topic.

  • Thank you for the nudge Chrystal, it looks like the requests have started to have some status updates on them now. Appreciate your help on this.