Add 'place' field for entry type Thesis (to distinguish University and Place)
Some styles want only the university name for a dissertations; others want University (University of California) and Place (Berkeley, CA). At present, there is no field for Place in the Zotero item type 'Thesis'. So it is not possible to get the latter type of styles working.
I ran into this while working on the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistic Journals, but I'm sure there are other styles out there in need of this.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/339/additional-fields/?Focus=18612#Comment_18612
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4497/thesis-problem/?Focus=19579#Comment_19579
Adding the Place field to the Thesis item type can't be very controversial, but the first requests for it were made over a year ago.
Some things happen very quickly in Zotero as a response to user feedback, others take a long time or seem to vanish in the depth of the forum (sometimes to "suddenly" (form a user perspective) bin incorporated months later).
Generally it would help to understand what's going on behind the curtain a little more - not just to keep us happy (I for my part am quite happy with Zotero as it is and where it is going), but especially because people like Rintze, fbennett, noksagt, me and some others write a lot of answers to questions - the more info we have, the better answers we write.
I realize that giving these requests their own category might lead to an increase in bolshie lobbying for this or that extension to the database schema, but it would improve communication over this important area of user-developer interaction. For users, it would make it easier to see what the priorities look like going forward, and to gauge the status of a particular request. For developers, it would make it easier to judge the level of demand behind a particular request, because users with a field-related issue would be more likely to land in the relevant thread.
One interface for user-suggested ideas that I like is WordPress ideas. It is a system that needs sustained attention of moderators (/faithful users) to weed out duplicate ideas, but if properly tended, it's a great tool for developers to get a clear idea of what the userbase considers to be high priority issues. It's not only a great way to centralize discussion of features, but the rating system gives voice to many users that might not feel like placing a comment otherwise.
Since the system has been implemented for WordPress, user satisfaction has arguably increased and everyone is happy — the devs because they are more in touch with the demand, and the users because they have a clear sense of being listened to. It is those dynamics that we're missing here.
zotero is fantastically helpful and responsive, but it is frustrating to see that some issues, even some absolutely central ones are just not dealt with, even if multiple requests pour in and from a user standpoint it is absolutely not clear why. In my view, the most glaring of these is the problem of detect duplicates and find and replace function, not to mention the problem of a missing style generator. Though I am not a developer, both of these seem to be simple and minor tweaks (almost every other program has them, so why is it difficult to implement them?), but they are just not dealt with.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/42/duplicate-detection/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/928/find-replace-function/
Moreover, the lack of these features generates a tremendous amount of traffic in the forums and work for both users and developpers.
Also, it is often not clear whether the developpers welcome lobbying for certain features or deem them to be a nuisance that clutters the forums.
An alternative could be to have a one time survey of user needs (with a web-based survey tool).
See http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ideas-and-kvetch/ for some background on the WP Ideas feature.
In another thread somebody suggested Dell's http://www.ideastorm.com/ - which looks pretty much like a blog with a ranking system. That could be a quick-and-dirty way: blog entry per feature, people add comments, each has a ranking/survey. Lots of other crap for free: categories, tag clouds, popularity rankings. Big question: who gets to add entries?
This old thread has some comments on how the zotero team is (or was) thinking about this.
The blog+ranking setup for Ideas is a good one. It's easy enough to build such a system with WordPress, too. Pick a good ranking plugin, use the TDO Forms plugin for various types/levels of submissions, and you're good to go. One issue, though, is user management. (Not just for authors, also for commenters.) We don't want to duplicate user databases I imagine. This could be an informally vetted group of 'friends of zotero' (fbennett's term I think), who at the same time would have the function of weeding out duplicates, referring people to the relevant ideas, etc.
mark is right it would be easy to set up, and I think enormously beneficial for all if everyone bought in (and even if not everyone bought in, but I'll hold off on that idea for now).
Next question: has anyone noticed this sleepy thread with a misleading title?
and if your working assumption is that Dan is aware of any active thread on the forum I have found that you're right almost all the time.
Being in a transgressive mood myself I'll follow up on a parenthetical comment in my previous post. I expect Zotero will in time become a larger ecosystem, in which related projects might be run somewhat independently. The CSL processor project is one model, but there may be others. This can happen not just with software proper but with e.g. documentation and user communities.