I see way to many users that file a bug report and then expect Joe/Jamie to personally email them for help after that.
You are kidding me right ? Are users so bloody happy to file the bug but then expect a personal reply in email for it?
I can tell you that as a developer there is nothing more that pisses us off is that expectation. We are so busy as it is we have no extra time to make personal replies and I know damn well Joe and Jamie don't either. Hell they rarely reply to any of my emails and I'm a damn good customer of theirs.
Now another thing that ticks me off and I'm sure Joe and Jamie hate it as well.
You file a bug and never friggin come back to reply. Why they hell are you wasting their time to do this and don't even care to come back and finish getting the help? You think the answer will come by osmoses ?
Sorry folks but Joe and Jamie aren't going to spoon feed you if you aren't going to go the distance on bug reporting so stop wasting there time please.
Now I hope that this can be made a sticky and posted clearly on this forum as it should be.
as far as I know forums usually have the intend of a "user to user" help platform, where as the bugtracker/support questions is a totally different medium
It is unclear (to me anyway) if you are ranting about this forum, the <a href='http://www.virtualmin.com/bug-tracker/' target='_blank'>http://www.virtualmin.com/bug-tracker/</a>page or your own situation
wow -- you over thought this out didn't you ?
I never once mentioned the forum did I ?
no you didn't, that's why your post was unclear to me, come to think of it, it still is :P.
Quote:
"I see way to many users that file a bug report and then expect Joe/Jamie to personally email them for help after that."
Still lost ? If you are sorry about that.
Relax, guys. We're all after the same thing (software perfection, of course!). And you two are among our best users when it comes to getting problems reported and helping us solve them! So, you two are definitely on the same side here. ;-)
It's true that we often do see bug reports in the forums, and in the tracker we see bug reporters that don't follow up when we request further information. And, the best way to get bugs fixed is to file them--talking about them in the forums isn't going to get them fixed, usually, since the wrong person (me) is the one reading the forums. I can help when you're confused, but when the software is flat out behaving badly (e.g. you see Perl errors, you expect one thing and something altogether different happens, you save a change but it doesn't "stick", etc.) the bug tracker is the only sane option, because it's the option that will get the problem fixed, almost always within hours (Jamie's a machine!), and with practical certainty by the next release of Virtualmin.
But, it's better for someone to bring it up in the forums than not at all! If we don't know about problems it's impossible for us to fix them. So, while it's far better to get the right data to the right people from the get go, getting the problem report to us via the wrong method is infinitely better than not getting the problem report to us, at all.
So, don't worry too much about the problems getting reported out of place--I've been working to make the website make more sense, and slowly but surely, we'll get to the point where the Right Thing is clear for the majority of users.
--
Check out the forum guidelines!
Actually I wasn't even talking about the forum at all. Where that came from I have no clue.
What I was talking about were the actual bug reports being submitted in the tracker and then instead of watching it they say "please email at...." as if you or anyone else is going to do that.
The other one is when they post a bug on the tracker then never reply after you or Jamie do which is very annoying because if I am searching to see if a bug has been reported and if there is a solution I see nothing but the report and 1 bloody reply and the bug stays open for 8-9 months.
This is what I was talking about.
This is why the topic says "When posting a bug please follow it !!!" and not "Please don't post bugs in the forum"
As a new user the thing that took me a bit to understand is that the bug tracker is ALSO the Virtualmin Pro help request.
These two things need to be separate.
I found a bug the other day and submitted it and Jamie said thanks :)
I feel weird though asking a "how do I" question there though for a couple of reasons.
First it's a bug tracker!
Second if my question gets answered there it's going to be much harder for someone with the same question to find that answer compared to if that question had been asked in the forum.
It would be nice to see a Pro section in the forum where registered users of Virtualmin Pro can post and others can see for reference but not post.
Also the fact that Jamie and Joe do this much with just two people making such a robust product blows my mind and is one of the reasons I paid for the Pro version to help support that. So I totally agree that people who post and think that the staff here are just little sever servants for them need to step back and look at the bigger picture.
I thought that the bug tracker is for bugs, feature requests and support. It's what the dropdown menu says anyways.
Per haps renaming "Bug tracker" to "Technical Support" or "Ticket System" would be less confusing to the new, after all how would I know if an issue is a bug or a misconfiguration I did? I'm not a (webmin) developer, but just a regular user of the product.
A forum is usually a community based "users help other users" and it's imo generally not so friendly to create Pro vs GPL boards (say no to Apartheid, lol)
From my experience, it took me quite a while before I realized that I could post support questions in the bugs tracker page.
I also respect the work Jamie and Joe do but I understand that you unfortunately can not force customers to use common sense in their approach
just my 5 cents (devalued dollar)
http://www.virtualmin.com/project/issues
Thanks, K