[BETA FEEDBACK] Why aren't we using a bugzilla?

http://www.bugzilla.org/
from Demigod Forums

Not exactly a recommendation for the game but for the actual bug reporting. We're currently using a standard forum which makes it very difficult to organize bugs, leading to the need of external webpages with the list of bugs, no ability to mark duplicates etc. Especially with the search function apparently not working (I tried searching for "regulus" and god 0 results every time), it makes it difficut to do a good reporting.

Why aren't we using a bugzilla? This was made for bug reporting and has all the features such a task requires. It is also free software so you don't need to pay anything to set it up. I know it's probably too late now to suggest this but I thought I might throw it out there just in case. I believe it would help a lot.

1,062 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Demigod Forums Top

I have been thinking this too. I wasn't aware of Bugzilla in particular, but there are loads of applications that do this, and could be maintained without too much effort from the developers. For example Trac.

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

As has been noted when this has been brought up in the past, it's difficult enough getting the bulk of users to provide solid reports even in an open format. Having to use an actual tracker would most likely too much like work for the level of dedication most people will put into beta testing.

In any case, GPG does have an internal tracker and people who handle filtering reports and adding the useful ones in there for their own use. And the feedback roundup is only "external" for readability purposes (firefox has a bug that can truncate the bottoms of very long threads), it's still as official as anything.

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Reply #3 from Demigod Forums Top

Kryo, I think you'd be surprised at what users will do sometimes. Filling a bug report is not much more difficult than making a forum post. This is how most free software development happens anyway. I think that without trying it, it's not fair to judge that it will be a failure. Crowdsourcing has been a tremendous success both in Software and other stuff like Wikipedia (honestly, who would have though 10 years ago that people would put in their time for free to something as immense as that?). Indeed, this attempt at a public beta with the pre-order is another sample of how crowdsourcing works admirably. A few years ago, all betas were internal as nobody thought users would be bothered (nevemind paying for the priviledge).

The thing is that a bug tracker is useful for people to have public access to. Then people can see for example how many people have the same bug, what the progress of fixing it is (or if it has been fixed already) etc.

Anyway, I don't mean to be annoying or pressuring and I understand if at this point of the beta testing this is not a good time to switch. However I hope that they might consider this option for the future. At least give it a try and then check the result. If it failed. It failed and you can always go back to the previous method.

Reply #4 from Demigod Forums Top

I use bugzilla at work too and maybe internal gpg uses it or something similar.  I think it'll work but I understand why stardock won't want to use it. 

 

Now if the search feature work for these stardock forums, it'll be much easier to search for existing issues.

Reply #5 from Demigod Forums Top

Another feature that would be useful in this task is a capability to allow bug reporters and other user to track issues they've posted. Currently the forum only provides a capability to get an rss feed for the whole forum. I'd love to have email notifications for new replies and/or rss subscriptions for each topic.

Forum software should be able to do this as well through thread subscriptions and the like but it seems this capability is not available here :-/

And search is definitely a must, shortly followed by duplicate marking imho