Community Idea Exchange Guidelines

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Thank you for helping us improve Esri Community’s experience. Whether you’re giving kudos to other community members’ ideas, adding supporting comments, or submitting original ideas, we value your contributions!

In order to help us understand your idea, we ask that you keep the following in mind both before and during the submission process.

The Basics

1. Before submitting a new idea, we recommend searching Community Idea Exchange to see if your idea already exists. If you do find an idea which is related to what you intended to post, save yourself time and vote for the existing idea by giving it a kudo. Optionally, provide any supporting information in the idea’s comments.
   
   
2. Submit your idea using the guidelines below for the community to vote on!

Esri reserves the right to review, modify, delete, reprint or redistribute all content that users contribute to Idea Exchanges. For more information, please refer to the  Community Terms of Use 

Pre-submission Considerations

1. No questions please.
   Community Idea Exchange is designed to receive requests for improvements to Esri Community experience. It is not meant to ask questions or request help.  If you have a question on Community, post it on Community Feedback to see if other community members can help or contact Esri Community team directly at esricommunity@esri.com for support on account issues or immediate challenges in using Esri Community.
   
   
2. No bugs please.
   Community Idea Exchange is not the right place to log bugs. Take time to review the Known Issues Help document first to find out if the bug is already listed and if not, please add a new post to Community Feedback. Generally, if a bug has already been posted in Community Feedback, then it should be listed on the Known Issues document.

Submission Considerations

After considering the points above, when you’re ready to submit a new idea, consider the following:

1. One submission = One idea.  
   If you find yourself making a bulleted list, you may have more than one idea. Having more than one idea is awesome! Because the number of kudos is part of what drives prioritization, it is important to understand what members are voting for. Help us make more informed decisions by only submitting a single idea per post. Submissions that list out multiple requests will be marked as Needs Clarification with kudos disabled until corrected.
   
   
2. Title.
   Use descriptive keywords and the functionality requested. Ask yourself, “If I were searching for this to vote on it, could I find it?”
   
   
3. Description.
   This is where you can bring the idea to life. Specific and descriptive wording is great.  Including screenshots is encouraged.  Gifs or videos are the best!  Your goal here is to provide the reader and Esri Community team with an unambiguous understanding of what is being requested.
   
   
4. Labels.
   Community Idea Exchange uses predefined labels to help us organize suggestions. If you see a label that relates to your suggestion, please add a label from the list to your post. Don’t worry, labels are not mandatory so you can leave this blank. Do your best and we’ll change it if we need to!
   
   
5. Tags.
   While Labels in Idea Exchanges are pre-defined, tags are freeform text that you can use to provide an added layer of searchability and specificity to your idea.

Community Ideas Statuses

There are seven statuses that can be applied to ideas in Community Idea Exchange. Please note these vary a little from the statuses for ArcGIS Ideas because Esri Community is hosted on an underlying technology that is not owned by Esri.

Below is an overview of these statuses, which are used to communicate with users about where the idea stands.

Open
All ideas start here! We use the submission guidelines above to make sure these are ready for voting and commenting from the community. Votes and additional feedback through comments help to move the idea along.

Needs Clarification
Thank you for your idea! However, we need a little help with understanding the request before it can be opened to voting. We'll communicate to explain what action is needed in order to change the idea's status.

Already Offered
You're in luck!  It is already possible to do what is being requested.  Ideas with this status should have a corresponding comment demonstrating the functionality or pointing to resources and they cannot receive additional votes.

Under Consideration
You've got our attention! We think this is a good suggestion and have entered it into our backlog. This does not guarantee that the idea will be developed so we encourage the community to continue voting and sharing feedback which will help gauge demand.

In Product Plan
We're working on this! This status does not guarantee that the functionality will be in the next monthly release, but development work has begun. Release cycles vary by product so make sure to check the product life cycle information to get an idea of when to expect the next release.  

Implemented
Congratulations! The idea made its way into Esri Community experience. Implemented ideas cannot receive further votes.

Closed
Unfortunately, not all ideas are a good fit. These are not being considered at this time and will not be open to further voting.

Ideas may be closed for different reasons, and we will do our best to communicate and let the community know why this idea isn’t a good match for our current plans. Thank you for your contribution!

Thank you again for taking the time to share thoughtful, high-quality ideas. We truly appreciate your contributions to continuously improving our Esri Community experience.

Please visit Community Idea Exchange to submit a new idea or lend your support to an existing one.