The March Community Asks Sprint has concluded!
As this was the third Community Asks Sprint, we’re starting to hit our stride. We were able to put forth critical design work for a variety of issues and fully address many more during this two-week sprint. Some of those issues were picked up from this sprint’s requests, and others were long-standing community requests we picked up from the backlog.
One item I’d like to bring your attention to is the request to put chat on the sidebar. As Piper put it, you read our mind! Chat is an important part of the “fast lane” in the three lane highway, so we’re excited for the future of chat and what it can do for the community- and we’ll be keeping a close eye on how it can evolve.
But the bulk of this sprint focused on quality-of-life improvements, making the day-to-day experience of participating on the network smoother. Here’s the full rundown:
- “Posts by deleted user” page should allow sorting by last activity
- Users should receive a warning before being question banned
- Allow excluding/including/only having Staging Ground posts in a custom filter
- Please add a warning when deleting a saved list
- Staging ground question left in half-deleted state
- Review votes have incorrect results when split
- About me and “Other” off-topic close reason can be submitted empty
- Triage audit failure message says spam or nonsense should be ‘flagged for closure’
- Change “bounty ended” to “bounty awarded” in answer’s timeline & revision history
- Please clearly indicate to users that they can only reply to a mod message once
- Staging ground comment field should say “Avoid answering questions in the comments”
- Low-scoring meta questions should no longer be hidden on the Meta.SO home page
- Text colour for hovered Ask Question button is similar to button background
- Remove “Recognized by XYZ Collective” text from the Recognized Member’s flair
On top of this excellent work, I’d like to put a spotlight on this collection of issues that were addressed during the sprint:
- Javascript error when visiting closed questions
- Getting "An error occurred; please try again" when flagging on several different sites
- Missing images on 404 page and 500 page
- Stacks editor toolbar popup not visible when expanding upwards
- Link editing is broken or difficult to use in Rich Text mode of Stacks Editor
- Cannot exit codeblock if made manually rather than via the code block button
The common thread among these issues is that they were raised just before or during the sprint, and our developers still found the time to address them. As we’ve sharpened our processes for the Community Asks Sprint, we’ve been able to make room for timely fixes and addressing regressions alongside the work we planned. That effort and flexibility paid off this time and is something we’ll keep building on in future sprints.
To cap off the work done for this sprint, I’d like to shout out to the developers working on the Stacks Editor and the overall writing/editing experience on the network- they knocked it out of the park. Not only did they make the time to address three of the above issues mid-sprint, but they also finished off another four that were originally planned for the sprint:
- Syntax highlighting when using a
lang-*alias is broken - Creating a code block in Stacks Editor includes one additional character after the selection
- Editor’s “inline code” button should not be available when multiple lines are selected
- Answer editor broken when not signed in
Next Steps
As always, thank you to the moderators for marking relevant issues with status-review and to everyone for voting on the issues that are relevant to you or that you’d like to see fixed or built. While we consider much more than just votes in how we identify and prioritize issues, votes are still an important signal we consider in the process of planning sprints and will continue to play a part in future Community Asks Sprints.
Community Sprints is an initiative that was launched about a year ago. We committed to four sprint weeks throughout the year to focus on both outstanding and newer asks from users that weren’t necessarily on the product roadmap, and we are planning to continue with Community Asks Sprints. The next one has not been scheduled yet, but we will share once it has been. In the meantime, we’d like to get your feedback.
How can we improve upon the Community Asks Sprint for the future? Would you like to see a specific focus for future sprints? We’ve tossed some ideas around internally, such as potentially having themes for sprints, and we’re curious to know what you think. Are there areas of focus you’d like to see prioritized?
