Ideas to improve bug investigations by the community?
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@doctorg said in Ideas to improve bug investigations by the community?:
Because we internal testers can not test all bugs we get reported.
That is exactly what I would like to improve on. For many (most?) bugs, it shouldn't require someone with internal access to go through all the effort it requires to confirm a bug. I guess you have to anyway in order to test the fix.
@luetage I believe less in written rules than I believe in culture established by 'just doing it'. I will commit right here and now to spend more effort to properly describe a bug on a forum thread and asking people to reproduce it before actually filing it, and also to check bugs others describe well in order to confirm them.
Anyway, some structure helps. Can we make a forum category for Bug confirmation? Similar to the feature requests... I don't think it would be good if the bug reports are scattered all over the place.
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@wildente We share the same idea, just see it a bit differently. I also think users should be more active about confirming bugs. The written rules are already there for everyone to read and follow. I’m not suggesting new rules, I suggest to make it impossible not to follow them. And yeah, a bug report forum board would be a great first step. This should be separate from help&support.
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Ok and for checking mail related bugs it would be really helpful to have some sort of sandbox account with plenty of nonsensical (ideally hilarious) emails and another with no emails to play with, and the two accounts can send emails to each other and nobody else. Maybe wipe them regularly. If I think I found some bug on my system, people can try to reproduce it there working together on the same account(s) without any privacy issues.
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How about adding the following optional entry in the bug tracker?
Has the problem been discussed in the forum? If so, post a link here.
I think that would at least help the developers looking at the bug to not start it from scratch and take advantage of the preliminary work already done to figure it out. It might also influence bug posters to actually discuss it in the forum first.
I've already done that in some bugs I've reported by adding it to the description field. But I think explicitly asking for it might help...
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@pauloaguia Sorry, we have got reports where only a link to forum was reported and a strange title for a bug, not any step-by-step-description to reproduce a issue.
Such reports can not be tested and devs rarely read thru many forum posts to find out what a reporter really means.A good report can have a additional forum link, that is ok.
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