Core 188 WUI changes

[ms (Michael Tremer)]

@bloater99

I do appreciate this and is why I set up a recurring donation a couple of months ago. I have seen other forums that give users who donate a badge. Not to pat the donater on the back, but to be a reminder to other users who aren’t donating.

This is planned. There will be some bigger changes around the donation process coming.

@bloater99

The more popular IPFire gets, the more feedback you will get. Both positive and negative. Unfortunately, people tend to speak up more about bad experiences than good experiences. I tried to help with more feedback when I suggested we look into why Distrowatch stopped posting core updates and it got fixed. I posted a review on Distrowatch, linked to it here, and encouraged others to write their own reviews.

This is very valuable for us and I appreciate it very much.

@bloater99

I do believe the more transparent IPFire is with their release notes, that will set up IPFire for fewer complaints. I might even suggest some sort of poll or voting system when considering non-essentials changes to the WUI. Users feel more invested if they play a role in changes that they end up really liking. An invested user is a happy user.

There is only so many ways to express the same things again and again. I don’t know how we can make changes like these more clear and get people on board. A picture says a lot more than half a page of text. Or something similar.

We do have a voting process… Well kind of… Every single change that goes into IPFire goes through the mailing lists. There is usually weeks when an update is around for testing. That is the time when I am open to receive feedback. Once things are being released I am assuming that everything went through the process correctly and that enough people are happy with the changes - or simply don’t care about specific things which is also acceptable.

@bloater99

A happy user is less likely to complain and more likely to donate.

Let’s be honest, the people who complain are never even sending a penny. The donors are usually the silent people and therefore there is this skewed image on the forum that “so many users are unhappy with this too”. That is simply not true, because the people who are happy or don’t mind don’t come forward. They express those things differently.

So, on here, I know that I am coming across as direct and sometimes harsh. That is because I have to see the bigger picture and I cannot waste hours and hours to chew once again through debates that have been had by the people who care about the code. If I would ask the moaners (and by that I don’t mean the constructive feedback people at all) there is nothing that would make them happy. They just want to moan.