I say it doesn't matter if customers are notified as to each new suggestion. Such notices would be totally impractical and useless. Voting is no substitute for discussion and debate. If voting could substitute for discussion, then why not, for example, just do away with political campaigns, and just vote right away and get them over with quickly? IB customers won't be able to vote intelligently, unless matters are discussed prior to voting. Their ability even to make good suggestions will be greatly reduced by the loss of opportunity to discuss. The use of voting, as a substitute for discussion, will also deprive IB of critically important feedback which sometimes comes in the form of comments from a few people, rather than votes by a majority. I can think of many serious issues, bugs, and problems which were solved through discussion on ET, but which could never have been addressed through some crude structure based on voting. I think that the idea of voting, as a substitute for discussing, devalues customer input. I think it is a step in the wrong direction. I hope IB will instead continue its recent trend toward greater interaction with customers, which I think has been very highly beneficial to IB and to its customers. I hope ET will make some effort to crack down on all the misconduct on ET, and particularly some of the unfair, fraudulent, and defamatory attacks sometimes launched against IB, by people who aren't legit IB customers, but at the same time, ET and IB should together promote fair honest criticism of IB. Fair honest criticism is a good thing for IB and its customers.
this pt. has been discussed previously. IB detractors are always exposed by other posters. the result is that IB comes out smelling like a rose. if you prefer a censor nothing will change your mind.
Jim as always you make good points. However, from a developer's standpoint, opinion quantified is a more efficient means at which to obtain the relative value of a potential implementation. Some of the suggestions in this thread are hardly worth exploring because they would only address a very small minority's wish. And time is money. So, not to devalue the points you made in your prior two posts, but for this particular topic (new features), I think voting better serves the IB community. And if this thread goes and IB decides to cease monitoring threads of this nature on ET, it shouldn't matter much. It's not as if they were implementing much of what was said here. And not for nothing, but they implemented things many traders here don't want or use.
There is nothing that would prevent anyone from opening a thread here on ET to discuss any suggestion brought up for a vote on the IB site. One of the problems with this particular thread is its catch-all nature. (although that was not its intent). By starting a thread here on ET about a suggestion on the IB site a few things could happen- IB could monitor and not reply, IB customers could see the poll on the IB site and check ET for any discussion of the suggestion before voting. As a result of the ET discussion, an IB customer (and hence a potential voter) could vote no and simultaneously suggest the approach that seemed to be the ET consensus or just a better approach without a consensus. Of course if IB has 30K customers and only 600 read the survey and of those 600 only 200 are ET users the effect on voting might not do much. However, it would get the new approach onto the IB poll. Obviously from an IB perspective only customers will be voting and they will not be anonymous. IB will not need to defend against some of the ET ranters that are not customers and finally IB could weight the votes by account size or commissions generated, etc.
I agree with you, that IB does come out smelling like a rose, but it appears that IB does not agree with us. If IB agreed, I think they wouldn't be asking to shut down this thread. If we and ET can't make IB happy to participate in this forum, then everybody loses. So I think we should try to get some changes to ET policy, to make IB be happy to participate on ET. I think censorship of clearly abusive or dishonest posts would increase, not decrease, our freedom of speech.
Thanks, ddunbar, and I value your posts as well. It is a mistake to think that efficiency can be achieved by reducing everything to a vector of numbers resulting from a voting format. Voting is no substitute for IB's participation in discussion with customers. I agree with you that much of this particular thread hasn't recently been very productive. I don't, however, think you've been around ET and IB long enough to know how productive other threads have been, and so, I think you are too eager to give up on what has been an invaluable channel for communications.
None of this substitutes for loss of the crucial ingredient of discussion between IB and its customers. A voting format provides no adequate substitute for this. I do agree with you that this particular thread hasn't recently been very productive, but I am more concerned about IB possibly turning away from ET beyond just this thread. The voting format would have some of the advantages you describe, but it would not substitute for discussion between IB and customers.
Note that as well as providing no discussion for the suggestions (which I think will be so numerous that they are hard to tell apart) there are the following immediately obvious issues: - 150 characters is far too few to describe a problem that needs fixing - you need to register to be able to post and many will not do so if they don't feel strongly about something so the sample will be tiny. So I plan to keep posting here and at T2W when something is important enough to bring to IB's attention. One advantage of this forum is that hopefully IB might listen because it puts their weaknesses up along with their strengths to help people decide which broker to give their commissions too. LOL. And when you put two 140 character posts up to include information that should have been in the first one ... how do you ask IB to fix it ... rofl ... damn this is hard "1036 Username: kiwi 150 characters is a joke It could be fixed simply http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&goto=lastpost&threadid=73376 0 1035 Username: kiwi The charting data feed doesnt include highs and lows of each tick sent. This means your bar/candle charts are inaccurate. "
However I'd like to suggest that we all vote for IB to stop developing features like IB Charts and create a smaller TWS and get the f'ing data correct. "You're wasting time adding features when you should correct basics like tws size and data quality"