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Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

I have a suggestion, because I find there's an issue with the beta testing. One is that you don't know if you should re-report old bugs for new versions. Was the bug skipped to be fixed later? Was the bug noticed in the forum? Did the bug re-appear?

It would be nice if we could use something like http://www.zuggsoft.com/mantis so that it is easy to see if a bug is closed(fixed) or not and then use the current beta forum for feature discussions and the usual interesting half off topic discussions we get now and then.

What do you all think?

Edit: Something that mantis really needs is the possibility for a bug reporter to edit the fields of his reports.

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 3:38 pm

It might be useful, but this is what the version history is for. Zugg is usually pretty good with his descriptions of what's fixed and whats not in the version history. He's also pretty good about tagging the bugs when they're fixed on the forum posts themselves.

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 5:31 pm

Rorso: Unfortunately, there was no way to integrate the automated crash dump system that is in CMUD with the mantis system. So, I track bug reports in an external database and have integrated the crash dump system with our web-based helpdesk system (HelpSpot). But there isn't any way for end-users to access this bug report.

Honestly, my experience with having a public bug database using mantis in zMUD was very negative. There was too much general support spam posted to the mantis bug database...it just seemed impossible to educate people to only use mantis for bug reports and not for general support. That is why we integrated the bug tracking with our helpdesk system for CMUD so that both are handled in the same system. But because the crash dumps often contain potentially personal information about their computer system, I don't like to make crash dumps public by default. Also, the bug database is categorized by the CRC information generated by the crash dumps, and so they don't make any readable "bug" subject that you'd want to track. For example, the crash dump system currently has several hundred topics in it, and it's mostly just a bunch of "access violation" bugs. It hard enough for me to keep track of these myself...I can't imagine anyone else caring about tracking all of those crash dumps. So it just isn't worth my time and effort to try and publish that database to the web (even after removing the private info).

Like I said, I spend lots of hours when working on zMUD getting Mantis set up and working, and from my viewpoint it was a complete waste of time.

In general, I expect beta testers to read through the Version History very carefully for each new version. I actually do *not* typically post "fixed" messages to the forum threads if I have already mentioned them in the version history.

The bottom line is that you should read the version history. And if your bug isn't listed in the version history, then you should test it again in the new version, and if it still occurs, then bump your forum post and mention that it's still a problem in the new version (and mention the specific version that you just tested).

Sometimes I'll mention in the release announcement forum post that I'm not done fixing bugs yet, and sometimes I have just marked some bugs as low priority. But if you bump your bug report post, I'll always mention whether it's a low priority bug or something like that.

Maybe someday I'll have time to do an online bug system again. But right now I'm just *waaaay* too busy just trying to fix bugs and get the public release done (not to mention trying to get the documentation updated).