Too often, threads that are bug reports require actual discussion. Many users don’t know the definition of a bug to begin with and discussion amongst users might be able differentiate what might be an unrelated issue, including misunderstandings about how things are supposed to work (the “feature/not a bug”) or perhaps bad data (bug or no?). The other overriding issue is that bugs change and evolve over time as fixes and tools are created to mitigate them.
Additionally, forum searches and even recommended threads steer us toward these bug reports, which are not always blatantly obvious as such. Things also get reclassified after discussion already begins. But once bug tagged, any further discussion, even if relevant, gets shut down.
I understand that the bug threads are maintained so that devs can do their dev processes. So it would be helpful for every “bug” thread to have a parallel, linked discussion thread that doesn’t interfere with bug discussion and dev processes.
There has been discussion amongst moderators and Microsoft about this. The discussion about how the template is used and possibly look into using something different.
But this is a good topic to bring up, and how the best way to handle many posts going to a bug topic which needs to be read by all teams. This current new guideline came into play as bug topics were getting long to read, when counting in all topics and the number of posts going to it.
Bug topics should only be reporting that bug using the template that is required and thus the reason it was added.
Been thinking for a while that there might be a better process for this, if nothing else just to let Hester get some occasional sleep instead of having to reclassify posts.
In one sense when a bug is marked as feedback logged or bug logged, then maybe let the discussion begin?
I’d also like to bring up that in the past, all bugs were to be reported via Support - Zendesk. Orginally the forum was never setup for us to report bugs.
It was moderators who suggested to also use the forum. Using the forum gives some transparency to us as a community to what has been reported. They added the use of tags for bug-logged and feedback-logged where if this was done via Zendesk, we’d never know what was reported or logged.
Not urgent, but since the template has come up, it is entirely PC-centric and not friendly nor informative for reporting bugs on the Xbox platform. Might be a good idea to either expand the template or create a different one for reporting by Xbox users?
I’ve also thought of this and discussed with the team. We agree it should only be kept to reporting that bug or work arounds for it - as that will help the teams involved.
Again, I do feel as us as community can pitch in our opinions about it. When doing so, put yourself in the shoes of the developers. Take into account the many bug reports (some are bugs, some are not and have to wade through them) and the amount of testing and reading time to go through them.
I personally see a lot of reports “It happened to me too” or “today again the same thing” without any other words to help assist in replicating such as where/when.
The forum software is very limited on what can be done as it’s 3rd Party. However, there is a plugin available to help guide a topic creation. It is this plugin that is currently being looked into.