Thank you for the detailed response.

Again, let me start by admitting fault in not communicating this more clearly: I assumed it was the most reasonable assumption that we would release features as they were ready, rather than releasing nothing, then everything. Once the redesign was ready we pushed it and all of the other features we'd finished to that point. There are other suggestions we've heard and plan to implement or are part way through implementing. … and, there are suggestions we don't plan to implement.

That modus operandi seems to be a trend in recent social web development (e.g. Facebook), but I don't think it's one that endears the developers to users. Prior communication is almost always a better option than just doing things whenever, especially in cases like this one where user advice and suggestions were explicitly requested.

Also, I suspect the release of new features at the same time as new visuals contributed to users' inference that what's been done so far constituted "everything." If a new feature pops up by itself, it's just a new feature. The inclusion of the graphic redesign made it seem like this was the entire redesign, period.

See my notes on your notes at the end of our notes doc. Several requests contradicted each other ("avoid clutter" vs "add feature/button/info X").

Thanks for the response. Before making a few specific replies, let me further explain why I went through the posted suggestions in that manner. Really, it was to make sure that I wasn't just upset because my own suggestions didn't appear to get much attention; I wanted to remove my own bias by looking at the contribution of the user base at large. As it turned out, my suggestions were repeated several times, and related suggestions were also repeated several times, as we both noted. On to specific notes:

• I think you're interpreting #11 a touch broadly. When I see "clutter" in the context of web design, I think of something that takes up more space than its function is worth, i.e. a net negative contribution. It's not adding anything, it's just adding things that are not overall helpful/desired. Of course, that's my interpretation, and others may not share it.
• I did not realize that the help page had been wikified, and that the welcome page will soon be as well. Thank you for pointing this out; it's a very good change.
• I agree that #3, #14, #18, and #22 are complicated and expensive to implement.
• I do not agree that #27, handling footnotes, is expensive. Collapsible sections take about 5 minutes to construct with CSS and Javascript, so the only difficult part would be adding a custom button to the article editor so they could be used. I have seen such buttons added in a variety of different editors (from vbulletin to wiki software), so I don't think that it's infeasible.
• I'm not sure that separating upvotes and downvotes constitutes the desired polling solution; the discussion in that comment thread indicated a desire to separate polling and karma entirely.
• I also do not agree that "don't add things without discussing" amounts to "design by committee"; ideas can be discussed without being subjected to a majority vote.
• You did not remark on comment previews. Right now, the system of "just post it and then edit it" works fine for the user making the comment; the problem is that other users may start replying to those comments while they are still being edited, and manually adding a "don't reply to this yet" note is tedious for the user. (I have been on both ends of this problem.) I understand that adding an entirely separate preview interface would take a fair amount of work, but I think there is a simpler solution. Place a check box above the "Comment" submit button that, when selected by the user, flags the comment as a "draft." The comment still appears in the thread, but only to the commenting user, without a date, and with an extra button to submit it fully. I am not familiar enough with the backend of the site to know exactly how much work this would entail, but we definitely already track user-based properties of individual comments.

After your responses to the suggestion list, my revised count is: 13 Y, 29 N (7 planned), 2 ?. (This is after removing the 4 repeats you identified explicitly.) That obviously looks much better than it did before.

I hear you, and I think you may be accurately explaining why many felt annoyed/ignored… but "I made a suggestion and the suggestion wasn't executed" doesn't add up to good evidence that you were ignored.

I think the principle illustrated here is without providing explicit information and description, action:[considering suggestions carefully and sorting them into "implement immediately," "implement in the future," "too costly to implement"] looks a lot like action:[cherry-picking a few suggestions and just ignoring the rest]. It's very hard to tell how much effort was put into analyzing the suggestions if that effort isn't somehow conveyed to us.