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(feedback site) A few questions concerning etiquette

Hello Nova and anyone else in charge of moderating here,

I have two questions about etiquette concerning providing feedback on other people's ideas.

First of all, is it acceptable to point someone to one of my posts as long as it is to bring up an alternative method or approach to their original idea? As an example: someone here posted an idea about adding blindness-causing smoke grenades to this game. Their idea was poorly presented - they didn't even bother proposing a crafting recipe, for example - but the idea itself is interesting. Now, I proposed the addition of Splash Potions of Blindness in my Reform of the Potions post a few days ago, which would be quite similar to the smoke grenade idea. So, to restate my question: would bringing my idea up on their thread be counted as unacceptable self-advertising, or would it (in your opinion) add to the conversation enough to be okay?

Second, I have run across numerous ideas on this site which I disliked, and which I would even go so far as to say are objectively bad. Consider, for instance, the person who casually asks for an entire mod (not even their original ideas, mind you) to be added to the game without a word as to how this would affect the game's balance, nor even a thought as to its compatibility with the spirit of the game. My question is, how would you distinguish between providing constructively negative feedback, and playing - in your words - "post cop"? I've always tried to explain exactly why I dislike the idea rather than simply dismissing it as bad, and I've usually been able to find at least one positive thing to say about each idea. Is that enough?

Thank you in advance for your response, and thank you also for all of the time you put in to keeping this site well-maintained!

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• June 29, 2019 04:35
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  • May 31, 2018 20:25
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  Hey thanks for asking.

  > First of all, is it acceptable to point someone to one of my posts as long as it is to bring up an alternative method or approach to their original idea? 

  This one is a super fine line, and I'm going to say it's situational. If you are visiting every thread that may be tangentially related to your idea and going "but I have something over here take a look" everywhere, that's definitely overkill (you know it, I know it, I'm saying it anyway). And if you're tempted to do that, it's likely we probably have too many duplicate threads going on, and please just send this to the feedback button instead of posting about it. There's a lot of different ways to quibble over the rules and just how far those go, so let's just say: Err on the side of caution.

  Things are still getting ironed out, bugs are still getting filed daily on our side, and a report button is on the list, but in the meantime use the feedback button if you're seeing duplicates, and it will get to me.

  >  I've always tried to explain exactly why I dislike the idea rather than simply dismissing it as bad, and I've usually been able to find at least one positive thing to say about each idea. Is that enough?

  Yes, that's constructive. Thank you for doing this. As long as it's constructive, that's absolutely fine. Explaining why you like things too also helps people form excellent feedback and suggestion ideas.

  Constructive and informative feedback (like this topic and to each other) is absolutely going to help our efforts here to make our site excellent and useful.

  Thanks for these questions, I love having meta discussions, and hope as we settle in we'll end up having less of these!