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There are a few questions on here that can be made into plugins or products that help users of FB, but that are just not useful for FC to take on.

I know there is a wiki for all known/approved FB plugins and related apps, but can we also get a wiki/discussion page for plugin ideas as well.

I realize I (or anyone else) can make our own page, but it might make sense for FC to provide it.

I also realize people can just cull this SE site for ideas - but then everyone has their own silo... it would be nice to collaborate.

We also run the risk of Joel's "steamroller" - i.e. if FC decides to use the idea or also develop it, but I think that many of these would things that FC has no interest in doing.

examples:

Essentially, what I am asking is if FB would like to share this question with the rest of its ecosystem?

EDIT

Apparently the only real possible need I might have identified (questionable) is a voluntary forum for people to identify what plugins they are working on. This avoids knowingly working on duplicates for those who want to share information. Dubious I suppose, but perhaps useful.

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Re:steamroller. I can't say this won't ever happen, but it's hard to imagine that we'd have incentive to duplicate a plugin's functionality unless it was purely accidental. It'd have to be a very in-demand, very buggy plugin made by a very unresponsive developer. All of our plugin developers are awesome, so I don't see that happening. ;-) – Jude Allred Jan 25 2010 at 21:28
I figured that - the higher risk is that some third party starts a plugin the FC is already working on - they do not know about each other... – Tim Jan 25 2010 at 22:33

2 Answers

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We've been pondering this for a while, actually. Anything we can do to strengthen our plugin developer community is a great investment for us.

If a solution to the problem is along the lines of a dedicated SE or FogBugz site, that can get done pretty quickly.

One hope was that plugin developers would find a community within this site... whether that works is an ongoing experiment. The idea was to encourage plugin owners to create tags on FogBugz.SE for their plugins, and generally be an owner of everything with that tag. There are certainly some code & website changes that we could make in order to facilitate this. There are some aspects of SE which are a little limiting of this behavior, however SE is continually getting better.

I'm greatly interested in hearing from you, plugin developer community, about what you would like/need. Few things would make me happier than to exactly satisfy the needs of your community. I'll ask a question about it....

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That is exactly what I wanted to hear. I think this site addresses exactly the issue of ongoing support for released plugins and perhaps for requests for plugins - it is just the activity about identifying plugins and then people sharing that they are working on a particular one (if they choose to do so) that I think was missing. I understand that FC is not really on the hook for this - I just saw it as some missing a little bookkeeping stuff. I concede that this is challenging - after all - it is suggesting a collaboration of competitors in some sense. – Tim Jan 25 2010 at 22:37
Having a forum of all feature requests is a great opportunity to identify product ideas. Good on ya for that. – Tim Jan 25 2010 at 22:38
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It already exists, check out this site: Fogbugz Plugin Ideas Forum

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I've seen that but it is not exactly useful for developers to have discussions about them. I suspect this is not something FC really wants to spend time on - you have your own wikis and cases to identify and develop the ones you want, but the rest of the community might also want to do this so it is probably better that we build our own space where this can be done. I don't intend to be critical - I just thought it might be useful for the ecosystem. – Tim Jan 25 2010 at 2:38

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