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I posted a month ago on My Requests for the Flash Platform, and I've been surprised at the lack of votes for the items I listed. Let me explain why.

My logs show that the blog post was viewed 840 times. I'll take off more than half of that number to account for crawler visits, people who didn't read the article, etc. So that leaves us with 400 people who could have voted on a bug.

Keeping 400 people in mind, here's what I see for the bugs that I entered in the list:

EventDispatcher should expose list of attached listeners. 4 votes
Include FlexPMD. 3 votes
Expose more of "additional compiler options" in the UI. 3 votes

That's a depressing voting percentage. There are a lot more bugs in the original post, and they don't look to have changed much in numbers either.

So why didn't people vote for these bugs? Here are my guesses:

1. You find it too much effort to vote for bugs

This is probably because you don't want to spend the time to register for an account. To show how easy this is, I just signed up for another account (which I will use to double vote for everything*). It took me less than 3 minutes, and most of that time was waiting for the email registration. The total time in which I was really doing something was less than a minute.

After you have an account, you can vote by clicking on a link in the left-hand column of the bug report.

It does take a bit more effort to create new bugs for things that are bothering you, and I know I haven't been very good at this. But I've been getting better as I've been thinking more about point #2.

2. You don't think voting for bugs matters

You voted for a bug that got deferred without explanation, or an enhancement that feels like it's being ignored. Or you've read stories about this, or you just don't believe anybody pays attention to a few votes on here.

I can understand why a lot of people would think this, but I think they're wrong. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was on the Flex team, opinions like this matter a lot to the team and future planning. The thing that's hard to see from our outside-the-team perspective, however, is all the other inputs going into the decision of what gets done or not. There's corporate goals, other internal team requests, what will make money, what people on the team want to work on, etc. So it isn't the only "vote" on the matter, but I think it's a very important vote.

3. You didn't like the bugs I entered

Now this is a reason that I can completely understand. Maybe you're focused on the Gumbo components, or better data services, or you just want more cowbell. In any case, if you didn't like the bugs I pointed to, I hope you're finding or entering the issues that concern you.

4. You don't have to vote to get something fixed... you have other ways

I think this only works if you're Doug McCune or work at Adobe.

* Of course I'm kidding about double-voting. Unless FP-444 doesn't really get fixed.