Thanks for feedback piranha305 and dop2000 - I asked, and I received! Yeah even if it's on the forums here (I don't even have social media beyond Reddit, tbh I'd actually make an account just to vote if it was only social media, that's how eager I'd be for some form of influence for C3), and it doesn't need to be "monthly", it could be once a new beta cycle starts and it could gauge what to make in the next beta cycle for 2 months into the future perhaps (of course not at the start of a new beta cycle and then expecting to have the suggestion made within the next few releases).
It's a shame it didn't come to be though when you suggested it a year back.
I think if we do a 6-monthly reset, we could take the top 10 or so ideas at the end of that period, and permanently archive them somewhere, so the fact they got a lot of votes is recorded and isn't lost right away.
I mean, I'm not 100% against the idea, but I guess I don't know exactly what you had in mind - if you archived the top 10 or something, would this be public, or tucked away at Scirra...and wouldn't this build up suddenly over time?
The whole point of this discussion is to figure out how to avoid people inundating us with a mountain of work that is literally impossible to implement. Then people get disappointed that what they suggested isn't being worked on. If people can post unlimited suggestions, we'll be inundated.
With the "monthly poll" idea combined with dop2000's "upvote once on all suggestions" idea, then you don't need to worry about the hundreds of new ideas that only get 6 upvotes, and you don't have to worry about being inundated with a huge amount of suggestions, nor worry as much about disappointing people, because: If the casual C3 user browses the suggestions website, and they know that they can upvote whatever they like, then they'll probably check out "Recent" and will hand out upvotes and comments to whatever they feel is a good idea, and ignore (or downvote?) the ideas that are poorly written, bad, pointless, or even defend Scirra on suggestions that go against Scirra's philosophy (e.g. The community will defend Scirra if someone's trying to attract attention to a "native export" idea - We care about C3 and we understand its mission and we would explain this to anyone trying to scream about native exports).
Once suggestions start reaching a high amount of votes, then it's up to Scirra to set boundaries on what they will acknowledge or not, maybe Scirra would only acknowledge & write a comment on the top 20 suggestions, which doesn't mean Scirra will immediataely work on the suggestion, but Scirra could at least provide feedback, even if a suggestion gets to number 1, Scirra can dish out the facts and say "Sounds great, this is feasable" or "That's impossible I'm afraid, [maybe a quick reason why it's impossible, just to soften the blow]".
I think it needs to be accepted that a fair amount of people will have to be disappointed, it's impossible to cater to all suggestions, but I guess I'm trying to focus on how to make the disappointment lower, as well as change the "reason" for disappointment. If people are competing to get their suggestion noticed, then yes disappointment exists, disappointment will always exist regardless of the solution to this topic, but where now we have people thinking "Does Scirra randomly check up on this website? Or not? Is it alive? Should I even bother?", we could instead have a busy suggestions platform with unlimited upvotes, and people would be thinking "Damn I need to write something well-written and spark discussion on my suggestion to encourage people to vote for it, because if I do, then it will rise and then there's a guarantee that it will be acknowledged by Scirra". This would happen primarily because the suggestion-creator knows the community has unlimited voting power, and would be thinking "The community are upvoting based entirely on how I write my post and the idea itself (and not voting based on "Hmm I only have 1 spare vote to give, I'll use it elsewhere"), so I better write this out well so I attract maximum attention".
This all relies on the suggestions website being a busy website, but I really do think that the consistency of a monthly/bi-monthly poll of 5 highly-rated suggestions (that Scirra picked from the top 10 highest-rated ideas) would surely attract people to the suggestions website. With the existence of these polls, people will know that the suggestions site is alive and thriving, which attracts more visitors, more votes, more participants - I mentioned doing these polls on Social Media; wouldn't this boost Scirra's visibility too when more people engage on your Social Media posts?
The absolute key point about being inundated with a mountain of work: The 5 suggestions that are in the poll will be voted on, and once the poll is over, those 5 suggestions will then be filtered down into one ultimate suggestion, which then Scirra could then work on. All said and done, this leaves Scirra with 1 suggestion to implement into C3 between each poll, and maybe commenting on like 20 suggestions. That's it for Scirra. The rest is the community curating the suggestions and essentially doing most of the admin work with votes and comments. A consistent pipeline like this just sounds really ideal to me, I wish I could articulate why.
I'm hyper-focused and passionate about the poll and "unlimited upvotes" concept, but to comment on the "minor suggestions" thing - I'd say keep this section! Or, can you do "tags" and make it so people can tag things as a "minor suggestion", therefore keeping categories tidy? If Scirra could then browse via "Highest-rated minor suggestions", then this can be another poll at a different rate to monthly (considering they are MINOR, this shouldn't become a huge addition to Scirra's workload), and maybe only acknowledge the top 5 instead, or however Scirra would want to handle the numbers and workload. Keeping in mind that these should still have the strict "This isn't exactly a minor suggestion, sorry" judgement from Scirra - because otherwise it WILL waste your time.