With the continued work on our phpBB3 system taking up the majority of our development time some users have emailed us asking if we even care of receiving feedback.

Before we get started I’d like to make it clear that we not only value user feedback, we thrive on it. Our great success today is in part due to the innovative ideas that come through our users. Having said that, if you’re a user on the support forum the feedback you see is in some ways deceiving.

We have over 10 Million active users on our network of forums, compared to just 8,000 on the support forum that posted in our feedback board. That means 0.001% of our total users are actually on the support forum offering feedback, a very small number indeed. To put that in perspective even more that’s like speaking to 100,000 users and hearing feedback from 1 person. It also so happens that the most active forums and users aren’t the ones leaving feedback on the support forum. It tends to be the forums just starting up rather than the already established ones.

So how do we gauge feedback? The best way we can: Data. We collect huge amounts of data that we use to determine which features people actually use and like. We use this data not only to improve on existing features, but also new ones we’re looking to offer.

Some of our most successful features (ie. Community Chest and Welcome box) have taken a hit on the support forum by a few lone users, although we were able to see by the data that they were highly welcomed by the masses.

In the end, next time you see 10 users asking for a feature or complaining about something on the support forum don’t be so quick to assume all users hold those views. We will watch closely and if the voices are in tune with the masses, we will take action. What we won’t do is let a group of vocal users make the decisions felt by millions.