I have just a sense that voting for tracker issues has slowed down tremendously but would like to have concrete data. I would think the query would be looking at number of votes per month compared to number of open issues per month. If it is true that there has actually been a significant decrease in voting then this might suggest people have lost confidence that more votes would naturally bring about more attention from developers.
Just a wild guess. This drop in votes may also be a result of the recent decision of core maintainers to un-assign themselves from issues which had been automatically assigned to them. I'm afraid this massive un-assignment procedure has had negative effects in moodlers' belief in the positive effects of voting for issues. After all, what's the point of voting for an issue that has no assignee?
Joseph
I don't believe that, it it would be faulty logic. Voting for issues is one way to get attention focussed on them. That is the same whether or not the assignee is nobody. In fact, if the assignee is Unassigned, voting can only be more significant.
Remember that when this issues were unassigned, this was not developers suddenly stopping work on issues. It was the information in the tracker being updated to more accurately reflect reality.
might suggest people have lost confidence that more votes would naturally bring about more attention from developers.
Well, please don't loose confidence! Just look at the 56 issues with more than 10 votes which have been resolved in the last 2 months.
Including:
I don't have the data on voting trends but I can assure you that votes on issues are an important factor that I use when deciding what our FRONTEND and BACKEND teams work on. I don't just look at raw voting numbers either - older issues naturally gather more votes over time even though a newer issue might be more pressing.
(Other factors are: whether it has solution patches; is a security bug; is affecting Moodle Partners; and is part of the major roadmap)
As I'm sure you know, there are always more issues than resources to solve them, and tough choices have to be made all the time.