๐ฃ Backfeed
User feedback reporting platform
Omni Backfeed is a user feedback reporting platform. Backfeed aggregates user data for your products, services, and experiences, providing a centralized location to iterate on your projects with user-driven insights and planning.
Backfeed is evolving from a feedback board into an AI-native feedback brain: it keeps the public board, voting, and roadmap at its core while learning to ingest feedback from many sources and triage it automatically. The board stays the source of truth, and human votes still set priority. AI handles the manual labor of sorting, not the judgment. See AI & Multi-Source Feedback.
Terminology
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Organization | The highest level, representing a company or group (managed via Gatekeeper). Surfaced in the app as your workspace |
| Project | A product or service within an organization that collects feedback |
| Board | The feedback collection area for a project where posts are displayed |
| Post | A single feedback submission (feature request, bug report, idea, etc.), addressed by a per-project number (#42, or PREFIX-42 when a prefix is set) |
| Vote | An upvote or downvote on a post to indicate support or priority |
| Comment | Threaded discussion on a post for collaboration and clarification |
| Reaction | An emoji response on a post or comment |
| Status | Where a post sits in your workflow (e.g. Under Review, Planned, In Progress, Completed); fully customizable per project |
| Roadmap | A read-only board that groups posts by status to show what you are building |
| Label | A project-scoped tag for categorizing and filtering posts |
| Signal | Any inbound piece of user input, regardless of source; a feature request or bug Signal becomes (or merges into) a Post |
Features
Available today
- Public feedback board: A shareable board per project where users submit posts and the team triages them. Public by default, no account required to view or post.
- Voting: Up/down votes on every post to surface demand; sort the board by top-voted or most recent.
- Comments & threaded replies: Discuss any post, with nested replies.
- Rich-text editor: Posts and comments support bold, italic, lists, and links, plus
@-mentions of people and#-references to other posts (GitHub#123style, with an inline search-as-you-type picker). - Reactions: Emoji reactions on both posts and comments.
- Statuses & roadmap: Fully customizable per-project statuses, a status-change timeline on each post (who moved it where, and when), and a read-only roadmap board that groups posts by status to communicate what you are building.
- Labels, filtering & saved views: Tag posts with project-scoped labels, filter and search the board, sort it, and save view configurations for quick recall.
- Attachments: Attach images and video to posts.
- Duplicate detection: When semantic search is configured, drafting a post surfaces possible duplicates so feedback consolidates instead of fragmenting.
- Project links & branding: Add website/social links and a project logo; workspaces carry their organization branding.
- Public & private boards: Control project visibility with a per-project toggle.
- Email-to-feedback: Each project has a dedicated inbound email address; messages sent to it become Signals and flow onto the board.
- AI triage (optional): With an embedding/AI provider configured, incoming feedback is automatically deduplicated, clustered into themes, sentiment-scored, and tagged. It degrades gracefully: with nothing configured, manual tagging and the in-app flow still work.
- Content moderation (optional): Submissions can be screened before they reach a board.
- Ecosystem events: Every change emits a CloudEvent (
backfeed.post.*,backfeed.comment.*,backfeed.vote.*, and more) so the rest of the Omni ecosystem can react, including closing the loop with Runa.
Planned
- More ingestion sources: Beyond email, capture feedback from in-app widgets, social mentions, app-store reviews, and chat channels, all funneled into the same boards (the Signal model already supports them; connectors are rolling out).
- Product reviews: Star-rated reviews alongside feature requests as a distinct feedback type.
- Analytics & insights: Deeper dashboards on user needs and engagement trends.
- Public API & webhooks: A documented API and webhooks to integrate Backfeed with your existing stack.
AI & Multi-Source Feedback
Backfeed is built around a single concept, the Signal: any inbound piece of user input, regardless of source. A Signal that is a feature request or bug becomes (or merges into) a Post, exactly as a manual submission does, so the board, votes, and roadmap are unchanged. Reviews, emails, and social mentions are simply Signals with a different source and type.
Available today:
- Email ingestion: every project has a dedicated inbound email address; messages become Signals on the board
- AI triage: with an embedding/AI provider configured, incoming feedback is automatically deduplicated, clustered into themes, sentiment-scored, and tagged
- Moderation: submissions can be screened before they reach a board
Rolling out:
- More connectors: in-app widgets, social mentions, app-store reviews, and chat channels (the Signal model already supports these source types)
Every integration is opt-in and degrades gracefully: with no AI configured, manual tagging still works; with no ingestion connectors, the in-app submission flow still works. Human voting always remains the prioritization layer.
Closing the Loop with Runa
When a feature request is accepted, Backfeed can hand it to Runa as a task. When the work ships, the original reporters are notified that their feedback was delivered, the single most effective way to keep feedback flowing.
Backfeed already does its half of this over CloudEvents: the first time a post reaches a shipped status it emits a backfeed.post.shipped event carrying the reporters behind that feedback, with no manual status-syncing required. The Runa-side consumer that turns shipped tasks back into Backfeed updates is rolling out.
Board Visibility
Backfeed projects are public by default โ this is intentional, since the primary use case is collecting feedback from external users who may not have accounts.
Admins can toggle any project to private in Project Settings โ Visibility. When a project is private:
- Only authenticated organization members can access it
- Unauthenticated visitors see a 404
- Useful for internal feedback boards or pre-launch projects
When a project is public:
- Anyone can view the board and submit feedback without signing in
- The project appears at its shareable workspace URL
Getting Started
- Sign Up & Create an Organization Get started by signing up and creating a new organization. This serves as the central hub for managing projects and boards.
- Create a Project Within your organization, set up projects to track feedback for specific products or services. Each project has its own board.
- Customize Your Board Configure your board to allow public submissions, internal feedback, or a mix of both. Set up statuses to organize posts effectively.
- Invite Your Users Share your board with users, customers, or internal teams. Encourage them to submit posts and vote on existing ideas.
- Review & Prioritize Use Backfeed's prioritization tools to filter, sort, and rank posts based on importance and feasibility.
- Plan & Execute Move posts through your statuses to build the roadmap, hand accepted work to Runa, and close the loop with reporters when it ships.
Integrations
Backfeed integrates across the Omni ecosystem and beyond:
- Runa for turning accepted feedback into tracked work (see Closing the Loop)
- Additional feedback sources and AI triage (see AI & Multi-Source Feedback)
- GitHub (planned)
API & Webhooks (Planned)
Backfeed will offer a fully-featured API for developers looking to extend its functionality. Webhooks will allow real-time notifications and automation with your existing stack.
