Wishist: Highlight should override effects

Hi Ethan and Taylor - 

A few things going on here I'd like to unravel. Indeed, we differentiate bugs / critical issues from feature requests on this forum, and who handles each internally. Bugs prevent shows from being done in-the-now - they are our highest priority, and our Support team focuses on getting them documented, into R&D for development, and fixed. As you may imagine, Support receives dozens of bug reports each day - some of them real issues needing investigation and fixing, some of them user error or misunderstanding - all of them needing time and effort from our humans to work through.

Before this year, this forum was not receiving the attention it needed, and many posts were simply buried and forgotten about. We have made a big effort to deploy folks to remedy that - but they have not been able to get through every post from over the years, and I have directed them to focus on more recent posts first. This post from several years ago received attention because our forums drag new activity to the top - another user replied last week, and our team began engaging. I'd like us to eventually get caught up on all posts in all Eos forums - but it is a big heap, so we'll get through it as we can. 

As the Product Manager, my responsibility is to handle input from all sources, and manage our available resources to drive Eos forward. Again, bugs and regressions always make it high up the list to fix first. But depending on the nature of the issue, the number of sites it may harm, and the complexity to fix it - I may decide to keep a bug in our backlog longer than other work. In addition to bugs, we also work on new features, innovations, renovations of older sections of the code, and support for OSs and libraries to keep Eos running on modern systems. Day to day, my job is to assess a list of priorities, and set them for the scale of work we can accomplish. Every moment of every day is a negotiation, and priorities change regularly. 

As such, the feature requests forum is exclusively my purview. I do keep an eye on requests and discussions there, as well as social media, private channels, and elsewhere. Please don't take my lack of response as a lack of awareness - the reality is that among my myriad other responsibilities, I often only have time to be selectively responsive across all platforms. To help folks understand how our feature request forum is used, I have added some explanatory text - I hope it helps.

And to the points above - the folks that support this forum frequently need to engage with Product Management (me) to assess what is being discussed before responding. "I am discussing with the team" usually means "I am chatting with Gonsman." In this particular case, the Stop Effect flag not being applied if a channel already has one is a bug - the discussion around changes to Highlight are not. I have also instructed the team to push folks to post feature requests into the appropriate forum, even if they have done so in a bug post. It is an additional step for you, but it separates the idea from other discussions and issues, and offers you the ability to think through and clearly articulate what you want - which helps everyone.

For my position on your ideas on Highlight, I think there are a few things we want to look at to modernize that function - and pausing intensity effects has been previously discussed. "Is this something ETC is working on?" No, not on a timeline worth discussing - we have other priorities we are focused on ahead of this.

I am always happy to discuss what we're thinking about for feature changes and timelines, and you're welcome to email. But like everywhere else, my inbox is generally sorted by height of fire and I am not always fast in responding.

I hope this brings some clarity to how we use our forums to respond to users, let us know how else we can help. 

~n~
_______________________________
Nick Gonsman
Eos Family Product Manager

Thanks Nick!