Unarchiving Bug Reports in TripleA Forums?
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I think it makes sense to 'unarchive' and unlock the 'bug reports' section.
Context: why is bug reports archived?
- Github issues is the bug tracker
- we made a pretty nice funnel into the bug tracker with a form to ask for specific pieces of information
- single bug tracker saves admin work of having different queues
- overall, wanted to encourage bug reports to go to the right place, the first time, with the right info. Basically, just direct people to the one place and try to do the best job possible in that one place (in terms of prompts for information)
Why unarchive Bug Reports?
I feel now that it is:
(A) somewhat draconian to have it archived
(B) over the recent years I've really come to appreciate the value in meeting people where they are.I feel less strongly, but the following are more reason:
(C), it's almost better if we have TripleA mods/maintainers & volunteers file 'issues' as formal bug reports.
(D) Driving traffic to 'forums' is good for the community, we get more of a vibe here. Driving traffic to the bug reporting tool won't be missed.Fears / Concerns / Steel Man
OTOH, things will become more scattered on the admin side. The fear is duplication of efforts, not being able to know what is where, what state, who is doing what. Another fear is low quality bug reports, which generally take more time for back-and-forth questions that could have been asked the first time (eg: "it's broke", "what is broke?", "the button", "which button?" .. etc...). Overall we need the info of exactly what is wrong, and what we think should happen.
Mitigating the concerns
We can potentially mitigate the various concerns (IMO) by:
- diligently creating issues to represent bugs
- we'll want to be sure to add links to the forum thread and issue referring the two to each other
- marking the bug report in forums with a label of 'closed' when the problem has been fixed.
What should the actual game do when telling players where to file bug reports?
In the game.. there are a few places where we have things like "need help, go [here]". Currently that type of text tells players to go to 'github issues'
I don't know (but could be persuaded either way) if it makes sense to encourage players to file bug reports in 'bug reports' or Github issues.
I somewhat suspect the game should indeed encourage traffic to forums, unless a bug report is "auto-created" from the game, in which case of course it just goes straight into the bug tracker.
WDYT?
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I'd say there is more upside than down. As you said, things will be a little more scattered, but I think there's enough people here who check the forum regularly, that they could suggest or do it themselves, the report to git and linking to the forum as you stated.
Having some sort of a notification, as you also said, would be key in keeping track of what has been solved and what hasn't.
One could bomb through them relativley quickly to see what wasn't fixed. If nodeBB can do that. The notification.
Actually that would probably work for my below thought as well.
You can always shut it down again if it too inefficient.
Slightly off topic but I've thought for a while that a "Common Bugs" or some such thread could be helpful. I don't really understand the errors that well to be confident in doing it though.
Some would be easy enough such as "missing unit image" but that's alraedy fixed for 2.7
Be a place people could search for some common bugs and find the answer. Maybe a link to the thread when making a auto report from triplea ?
Idk. Might not be worth the hassle
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@lafayette i like all of this maybe both links? people that don’t do git hub will just ignore that but folks that understand it may prefer interfacing that way. i also wonder if there’s any way to easily link the threads and issue programmatically so forum reporters can get notified automatically when there are issue updates
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@ubernaut said in Unarchiving Bug Reports in TripleA Forums?:
@lafayette i like all of this maybe both links? people that don’t do git hub will just ignore that but folks that understand it may prefer interfacing that way. i also wonder if there’s any way to easily link the threads and issue programmatically so forum reporters can get notified automatically when there are issue updates
Just link the Github-issue here, and a label shows that changes from open to closed once the issue is fixed.
Example: https://forums.triplea-game.org/post/73296
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/13902 -
@lafayette Usually, in the past here, and permanently on axisandallies. org I have always evaluated (depending on my own abilities) the bug-reports and created related Github issues.
I think Github is the place to work on issues (based on Github issues). But the forums are a place to collect information from Github- unaware or -reluctant people.
So yes, let people create "bug-reports" here again.
BTW: They never stopped doing it, they just chose other forum categories.
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@LaFayette
Player engagement on GitHub is irregular with 4ish non-devs chipping in, so if we get more on these forums then for me objective achieved.Soon 2.7 will be on continuous release, but there are times when the latest version of 2.7 is not the version to download and will cause more problems than it solves.
It would be good if an older stable version of 2.7 is offered for download, but how to automate this? eg. a month older than the current date
This would allow the Devs time to release a sequence/set of engine releases.Also, it would be good to let players know that sending bug reports for v2.5 are auto closed as 2.5 is not supported any more and the Dev focus is solely on 2.7+
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My thoughts run about the same as those already mentioned. IMO most of the errors posted on GitHub are the auto-generated, so if the forums are used to gather additional information, that would be a good thing.
Cheers...
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Thanks for the response @beelee
w.r.t:
@beelee said in Unarchiving Bug Reports in TripleA Forums?:Slightly off topic but I've thought for a while that a "Common Bugs" or some such thread could be helpful. I don't really understand the errors that well to be confident in doing it though.
Hopefully "common bugs" would be resolved rather than left as a "known issue". The bug queue itself is ideally searchable enough.. I don't think that works very well (at all) in practice for an average user, but who is to say a list of common bugs would not have all the same problems and just be as difficult to find information from?
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@ubernaut said in Unarchiving Bug Reports in TripleA Forums?:
people that don’t do git hub will just ignore that but folks that understand it may prefer interfacing that way.
I don't think it should be a matter of preference. The framing IMO is wrong (I kinda reject the framing, those that think 'github' is just for developers are ignorant. Specifically when we are just talking about using "github.com" for its web UI and its web forms. I digress though.)
I read somewhere that one project allows public access to github (GH) discussions, and only those from a select group access to issues. The idea was the general public discusses items, the team creates the bugs. (Side note, GH discussions is incredibly under-used by us. We should use that for feature request tracking, but I digress again!)
I think similar idea potentially here. Try to focus on 'issues' as being bona fide bug reports. A formal bug report is a real thing, and for good reason.. you want people to spend time diagnosing a bug, not spending their time first trying to understand what the bug report is even saying.
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I'm not sure if it's been stated, we want to be able to tell from the title alone of a forum post whether it's "fixed" or not. Opening each forum post to then look for a 'github issue' card is a lot of overhead (in which case things become unworkable). If we can label the 'closed' or 'fixed' forum threads, that would be helpful.
A de-facto way that "forums" works in general, anything that is 'old' tends to be considered closed. Kinda a nature of this format. If we only ever look at posts that have been updated in the previous month, then there is extra importance in creating the formal bug ticket (in GH issues).
Bottom line: I believe there is consensus here. Specifically to "drive" players to the forums for issues/help/bugs. We'll reserve creating actual bug reports to those who are in the know. If anyone wants to fix up the forum descriptions/texts/layout (who has forum admin/moderator), please feel free to do so.
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@lafayette maybe i’m mistaken i figured u needed to create GitHub account in order to use the bug report forms
