How to submit a feature request, and where to send it

A feature request is a suggestion that a product should do something it does not do yet. Submitting one well takes two things: sending it where the team reads requests, and writing it so it can be found, voted for and understood. The routes below were each checked on the vendor's own help pages on 4 October 2026. The numbers come from over 800,000 public requests read the same week on the trackers of Atlassian, JetBrains, VS Code, GitLab, the most starred GitHub projects, Mozilla Connect, Spotify's, Autodesk's, Zendesk's and Intercom's idea boards, Miro's Wish List, Discord's feedback board, Minecraft's feedback site, Microsoft's Feedback portal and ten Discourse forums.

How do you submit a feature request?

Find the product's own route. Most products name one in their help pages: a form inside the app, a public tracker, or a community forum. A request sent to general support may never reach the people who decide.

Search before you write. If someone has asked already, adding your vote to their request counts for more than a second request that splits the votes. On the three largest public trackers read, 33,542 of 357,754 feature requests, about one in eleven, were closed as duplicates: 7.8 percent at Atlassian, 11.7 percent at JetBrains and 7.1 percent in VS Code.

Ask for one thing. VS Code's guide asks for a single request per issue, never a list, and Bitwarden's forum asks for one per topic, because a post holding three requests cannot be voted on for any one of them.

Describe the problem before the feature. Say what you were trying to do, what happens now and how often it gets in the way. Discourse's own feature category asks for the use case and why it matters, and the problem is what a team can weigh against everything else it could build. Ten example requests ranked worst to best show the difference.

Vote instead of commenting +1. Where a product counts votes, the count is a button or a reaction. VS Code's triage guidelines say an upvote means the thumbs up reaction on the issue, not a comment.

Expect silence. Chrome's help says it probably will not send an individual response. Discord says its feedback form gets no reply, and its old public board set a status on 42 of the 70,653 posts filed there from 2020 on. Obsidian says the team reads every request but does not respond to them. Apple's developer page says it cannot reply to every submission. A missing reply is the normal outcome, not a sign the request was lost.

Where do you send a feature request?

For an open source project on GitHub, most of the top thousand mark requests with a label, half offer a feature request template, and many keep an Ideas category in Discussions as well.

Some routes come with rules worth knowing first. Apple's idea submission policy says it does not accept or consider unsolicited ideas, and asks for feedback only on its existing products, through those forms. Feedback Hub lets anyone add feedback, but without a signed in Microsoft account you cannot search what others sent or see the status of your own. WordPress discourages unsolicited feature tickets on its Trac tracker. Trello says it may never build a request that does not fit its plans for the app.

What happens after you submit a feature request?

Usually little you can see. On most of the trackers read, the typical request draws one vote or none: 62.3 percent at JetBrains and 52.4 percent in VS Code have no vote at all.

The rest were closed for another reason. The median open JetBrains request was filed six years before the read. VS Code closes a request that does not reach 20 upvotes within 60 days, and of the requests filed since July 2020 by people outside the project, 54.3 percent were closed that way. On the Discourse forums, 43.2 percent of requests with no votes never got a single reply.

What makes a feature request more likely to be built?

Votes help, though they decide less than most people expect. At JetBrains, the share built more than 30 days after filing rises from 24.1 percent of requests with one to four votes to 59.5 percent of those past a hundred. On Bitwarden's forum, which tags what it ships, 1.6 percent of requests with no votes were released, against 34.2 percent of those with fifty or more. At GitLab, requests from paying customers were built 19.7 to 26.3 percent of the time below fifty upvotes, and 35.6 percent past it. On Mozilla Connect, 0.4 percent of Firefox ideas with one kudo or none were delivered, against 25.6 percent of those past a hundred. On Spotify's Idea Exchange, 0.1 percent of ideas with no kudos were implemented, against 49.8 percent of those past a thousand. On Autodesk's idea boards, 3.1 percent of ideas with no votes were implemented, against 38.3 percent of those past five hundred.

Who asks matters too. In VS Code, requests filed by people who had already contributed to the repository were built 43.1 percent of the time, against 12.0 percent for those filed by people with no connection to it. Discourse's guide to requesting features says requests from its hosting customers come first, and Atlassian's policy says votes are weighed alongside support tickets, product analytics and research.

So the request most likely to be built is one that many people back, from someone the team already knows, about a problem that fits where the product is going. The parts within your reach are the search, the vote and a clear description of the problem.

How do you write a good feature request?

Four short parts are enough:

1. A title that names the difficulty, such as "Can't export a filtered view to CSV", rather than the solution you have in mind.
2. What you were trying to do, in one or two sentences.
3. What happens now, including the workaround, if you have one.
4. How often it gets in the way, and for how many people, if you know.

A free feature request template has the same parts as Markdown, a web form and a GitHub issue form.

What if you are the one receiving the requests?

Then the silence above is worth avoiding. A request that is visibly declined is better for the person who asked than one left open for six years. On VoteFirst, Denied and Completed are columns on the board by default, so every request shows where it stands. Voting is anonymous by default, with no account to create first, and when a release includes a request, every voter who was signed in when they voted is emailed that release.

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