How does Ideas actually work?

I was just looking at the RE Ideas yesterday and was reminded (once again) how unfriendly it is.  

• All of the comments that were brought over from the old site have the same date of March 17, 2016.  
•  Some ideas that were implemented years ago are still marked as "Planned" (i.e.move phones/emails off of addresses)
• There are a good number of ideas that have hundreds of votes that have been on there for five and six years
• Very limited sorting and filtering options.  For example, would be nice to see most popular ideas that were created in the past year.

The RE NXT Ideas site, understandably, has much more activity from Blackbaud folks with plenty of status updates for the submitted ideas.  


From what I have seen and experienced the RE Ideas site is now just a repository for RE7 questions and issues that Blackbaud Support can't answer (in the voice of HAL 9000: "I'm sorry Dave you cannot do that in The Raiser's Edge, but you can submit it to the Ideas site...").



 

Josh...thanks for brightening my day yesterday with the HAL 9000 quote!  Makes me think of a former coworker's t-shirt that said, "I've been cut by the Raiser's Edge."


Sheila...a former boss of mine used to say something similar about RE canned processes.  He said it about Reports, but I find it's also true of Mail, and sometimes Import/Global Change.  He would say that a canned report will give you everything you ask for until the very last thing.  (At which point, he would call on me to create a custom report.)


I've found the same as Josh, the NXT Idea Bank tends to be more useful, as there aren't as many posts and BB staff is able to keep up with things a bit better.  Plus, the nature of the work, building a new interface, especially the way BB is doing it with a lot of feedback and input from customers, means that the Idea Bank is very useful to the developers.  However, you can still find a significant number of duplicate Ideas, where someone posts without searching.  (I'd hate to work in their databases!  Imagine how many duplicate records there could be!)  But the RE7 Idea Bank is just out of control.  I think because for a long time no one was responsible for maintaining it at all, and cleaning it now would just be overwhelming on top of other job responsibilities.  It would be really great if someone at BB could be hired with the sole responsibility of cleaning and updating all of the Idea Banks and then maintaining them moving forward.