Probably not the place but judging by the unhappy comments about unhelpful posts and unhelpful posts themselves (possibly including this one), it would be neat if there was a designated category for “Software Updates”.
Where the thread structure was more restrictive. So at the top of the thread, you could upload the release notes (once). And instead of being able to write any comment after that, you were given a template of questions to answer when posting:
What was your previous fw version:
What model, year, autopilot, and mcu version do you have:
What has improved or regressed with AP/FSD:
What other perceived changes have you noticed:
Im biased but it would be such an improvement to FW tracking for those who follow them.
You could have a poll or counter at the top of the thread that lets people voice their frustrations and summarize data points like “I’m still waiting”, “failed to install” (which is useful), “I have it but haven’t tested it”.
Bruce, do You have a recommendation for how to propose a suggestion like this?
Gah, you folks made my spidey-sense tingle.
I'm not sure how to implement what you described in a technical sense. More theoretically, I think more structure greatly increases the signal-to-noise ratio (more useful). On the other hand, some of the items you suggested might take awhile to gather (in particular AP changes...sometimes you have to drive a few dozen or hundred miles to really understand the behavior of a software build).
The main thing I had complained about was the "OMG I got something I wonder what it is I'm gonna go install it now and let you guys know what it is when it's done KTHXBAI" kind of posts. (Yes I am being very sarcastic and facetious here.) Those basically add zero value. I'm happy to not have seen any of those for awhile.
The posts like "I've updated from version X to version Y" are more useful, although after the first few of these, there's less value. One exception is where there are very few updates (or a long tail) to a version but people still keep getting it, because those point out differences from the expected roll-out pattern. In general, if I post something I find it helps to think "are my fellow TMC members really going to care about my post right now? in a week? in six months?" before clicking "Post".
BTW I encourage everyone to update ev-fw.com when they get a new software version. That site and TeslaFi are great resources (and note that they provide different views on two different data sets).
I've been trying to push the idea of cross-platform forums as well (so for example S/X owners can talk about firmware issues in the same place, and if the 3 software ever converges as well, then their stuff can get rolled in there too).
Getting back on topic, I wish I had something interesting to say about 2018.18.2, although I don't have it, so...(shrug)
Bruce.
(running 2018.16 on my S85D and generally happy with how it works)
PS. There are other moderators for the S and X forums...I invite them to weigh in also, although I think they prefer to keep a low profile.
PPS. Data-geek thing: It'd be interesting to do a scatter plot of recent firmware updates where the X axis has the old firmware version and the Y axis has the new firmware version. I hypothesize there might be some interesting clusters in that data.