Confirming, Confirmed? - how the bug reporting system hides common bugs
- Thread starter Ian Doncaster
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None of the bug pages require a login to see, any more than you needed a forum account to read the bugs lists when they were on the forums.
EDIT: and if Frontier invested the necessary staff time into going through and cleaning up all the duplicates, the bug list would be several miles shorter than it currently is!
The problem is that it can't work as expected, because some of the most commonly reported bugs, due to the duplication problem, aren't even eligible to vote on.
Worse - it requires everyone using it to be following the same procedure. Once people start filing bugs without searching, even those doing it right will end up splitting their corroborations between a range of bugs. If they dropped the corroboration requirement to ~2 then enough people appear to be using it right to overcome that effect.
It's basically the Powerplay of bug reporting software. (Though we don't yet have 5Cers who don't want a bug fixed intentionally filing a new report of it once a day to smear out the corroborations, I hope)
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You probably have the wrong sort of web browser, have your web browser not configured to accept all the necessary cookies, have your web browser not configured to run all the necessary (and indeed unnecessary) Javascript, and/or have your privacy settings for cookies/JS turned up too high. Or it might just not like you - that's another possibility.
That bit actually makes sense, since if we could vote on unlimited issues we'd probably mostly just say "yeah, that's a bug and should be fixed" and vote for all of them.
For it to be a useful way to highlight a bug out of the Confirmed pile - if bugs were getting to Confirmed more regularly, that is - you need to have to choose which one to go for. (I haven't actually used my fourth vote yet - there doesn't seem any point in putting it on one Frontier have already said they'll fix like the priorities bug)
Makes sense to me, choose the bugs you really care about. Otherwise we know there are "zero tolerance to bugs" people who will vote for everything, which then doesn't help fdev know what people want fixed first.
Similar systems are used in other realms. Political votes etc also work by restricting votes.
It's an automated service, the idea being low maintenance, the QA team is the customer. We are also providing the 'Stack Rank' process which if looked after by Fdev will provide a priority list. What is lacking at the moment is someone at Fdev needs to go in at their end and tidy up and merge all the duplicates. That said, who knows when they will get round to doing that, the longer the list grows, the more reluctant I would be to tidy it up!
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FD can pay me to tidy it up weekly. 
Yes, definitely. If they don't start soon - and bearing in mind that they don't get the natural "archive the bug forums" cleanup with each release now - it's going to be an unmanageable catchup job later.
It also makes the bug situation look far worse than it really is.
There's 15 copies of the skimmer bug, 10 copies of this, 5 copies of that. If they merged all the duplicates they'd perhaps halve the total numbers of bugs.
There's also at least a few entries for bugs which were fixed in the 3.4 release (the odd NPC takeoff pattern, for example) which are just hanging around in Confirming and won't get out of there now that it's fixed, but if they don't mark them as Fixed, it looks like 3.4 fixed exactly five bugs (and one of those it didn't fix properly).
Properly maintaining the system, rather than relying on The Algorithm to do it for them, would make the bugs situation look far better even before they started fixing things...
No, this makes no sense. It makes apparently sense only from our view, so to say, as it seems to be for us most important to say which bug is most important to us.
But from the view of the bug killers, the developers, it makes not so much sense. We are missing very important information: how hard is it and how risky (side effects in the code) is the bug fixing. We don't know this, so with the current system, FDev may end up with a large set of "VERY IMPORTANT" bugs, which are hard to find, hard to fix, may induce more new problems, all in all are very expensive to fix, so they won't.
If it is only about our priorities it could be much easier. Just read the forum or search it for kewords in the database, count occurences and rank it.
Reporting bugs by us is fine.
Dedoubling, evaluating, judging and creating priority lists has do be done by the developers/quality managment team. Priority here is ment to include severity of the error and costs to fix it. And costs include complexity and risk of side effects. As you can see already here, this is not easy and can not be solved by swarm intelligence with lack of knowledge (=us).
You don't mean NPCs taking off from outposts and arcing over backwards to end up stuck to the edge of the pad, blocking all access and not being destroyed by security? That's still happening.
Fair enough - I hadn't seen it since 3.4, and the only bug reports I could see for it in the reporting system were from 3.3, so I assumed that as part of "making an autolaunch that doesn't lead to rebuy" they'd fixed it.
Huh, well, that kinds sucks, as firefox seems to work with every other site I use.
Oh well, not gonna play around with security settings just to do unpaid QA.
I don't have Firefox security settings adjusted below defaults and the Issue Tracker works just fine for me. There are some sites that do not work with Firefox (and I have a backup browser specifically for that reason), but the Issue Tracker isn't one such site.
No clue then. Maybe I got headlook hacked.
Since CMDRs who do the same are insta-killed by the outpost lasers, it should be the same for NPCs. Also, it's CMDRs who get the fine if they gently nudge the itinerant NPC off the pad (when you even can - often it's too stuck, thrusting down onto the side of the pad surrounding).Wait, that's a bug? I thought it's a feature that leads to immersive gameplay:
renitent NPC pad blocker
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He wasn't commenting the sprint length, but the active user involment.
It seems that only allowing four votes means that after I have voted for my 4 most important bugs I cannot vote for any others that come along after, that I think are more important to me. Allowing me to redistribute my votes at any time is not going to be helpful to the developers though... so I think the voting needs to be limited in a different way that somehow isn't vulnerable to spamming or abuse. The comparison to PowerPlay is awfully close for my comfort - a broken game concept re-purposed to serve as a bug report and management system, oh dear. I also agree with RexKraemer that bug repair triage needs to include important information only available to the developer - but I may expect (hope / imagine) that happens anyway, we just aren't told explicitly, and left free to imagine that our opinions are the most important thing. I haven't risked reporting a bug report about the bug report system yet, but I think it's not going to be long when I find bugs reported as 'Fixed' still occurring.
I dont know why anone wonders that the new Bug-Reporting System is actively hiding everything from the playerbase. It was Pretty clear the day it was announced. On the other Hand, I think that These loads of Bugs in Elite are not manageable for a Team like Frontier has (even if it really has 100 ppl working on it ) - so they had to Change something.
) - so they had to Change something.