Topic: Bug Tracking

[RobRoye]

As nice as it would be to have everyone that finds a bug immediately go to the correct bug tracker and perfectly report the problem in a nice concise way that is easy for the developers to understand - it doesn't happen that way most of the time.

Most of the time people report a problem or ask a question here. People are weary of it that are daily forum users. This is understandable. What I suggest is that the experienced users point out the bug tracker in a nice friendly way to the new people so they don't get the idea that the dev team and experienced users are dicks.

Perhaps make a nice text file with several canned messages in it and paste the appropriate one in a reply. I do that myself for the forum I operate.

Even though the frequent users get tired of seeing this and are exasperated about people not seeing the Bug Tracker link to the left - new users don't always look the whole site over first. They come here for a specific purpose and go right to the forum, not even searching (or just don't have good searching skills). It's a simple fact that will not be changing. Please do everyone a favor and just nicely direct them to the correct location. Maybe even just provide a link to the requested material and then a link to the search area. They will happily search for future requests and then let everyone know how wonderful the people are over at contribs.org.

</rant>

[raem]

RobRoye

> What I suggest is that the experienced users point > out the bug tracker in a nice friendly way to the > new people so they don't get the idea that the dev > team and experienced users are dicks.

I don't see evidence of people rudely telling others to search etc.
It is more often the case that "beginner" users react inappropriately and take offence when an experienced user advises a "beginner" to post to the correct forum or bug tracker or search or whatever.


> Maybe even just provide a link to the requested
> material and then a link to the search area.

The experienced person will often advise a beginner to "search", as they know the question has been answered before and the answer will be easily found. That also prompts the beginner (by force) to improve their search skills.
The better lesson is in the doing rather than the telling.
Keep in mind also that the experienced person often has little spare time to do searches for others, especially searches that the "beginner" is quite capable of doing for themselves.

I'm sure in many cases involving developers, they ARE wasting time having to trawl through forum posts watching for possible bugs that SHOULD have been reported to the bug tracker instead.
This is particularly so with beta software releases where ANY problem is likely to be a bug.