Feedback talk:Bug reports

Guild Wars Support Forums

I suggest that all the "Feedback:Bug reports" pages be fully protected and have a template placed at the top of each page directing people to submit their reports on the Guild Wars Support Forums, which (unlike the "Feedback:Bug reports" pages) has a ArenaNet member replying to reports. --Silver Edge 04:56, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree: we should lock these pages and redirect people to the official support forums.

I wish ANet had done things the other way around (redirect the forums to here); I think there are advantages to the format (and research/testing cadre) available at GWW. However, there's no advantage to misleading people; obviously, ANet is focusing more (all?) resources on the forums.

I'm going to leave a note on Lo Presti's talk page, asking him to double-check that the QA team has stopped visiting GWW's bug reports. — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 05:23, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Gaile has stated that the Feedback:Localization bugs pages are still being used by ArenaNet, so those shouldn't be protected. --Silver Edge 05:33, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Also: "The Guild Wars Support Forum is the place to report Guild Wars game bugs. ..." — [1] (i.e. ANet asking people to post on the forum). And "The Bug Report sub-forum of the Guild Wars Support Forums is the new official home for bug reports." — [2] — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 06:00, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

interesting.. when i notice someone trying to report a bug i tell them to just go to the support page but now that there is a forum... when did this launch? back on topic i think that yes if anet went thew the effort of making a support forum then i think that's were we should direct people. also dose the new forum support links to the wiki? a lot of support questions can be answered via links to the wiki.- Zesbeer 07:32, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I think they just launched, judging by the posts from Gaile et al. Some posters are directing ppls to the wiki. I feel they missed an opportunity to integrate the two approaches. — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 09:10, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/2011-06-20. --Silver Edge 03:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

(Reset indent) As noted in his news page I linked above, Stephane Lo Presti has also stated that the "Feedback:Bug reports" pages should be protected and new bug reports should be placed at the Guild Wars Support Forums instead, so the remaining tasks are to create and place a notice at the top of each "Feedback:Bug reports" page, then asking an admin to protect the pages. Maybe something like:

Note: Please post bug reports at Guild Wars Support Forums.

--Silver Edge 01:49, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree. I think we can be more emphatic:

• Archive all the current contents and protect those pages (they will still be available for QA to review, should they want to).
• Post only the note on each of the bug report pages, so that there is no confusion about where people should go.
• Add a parenthetical to the note explaining that, e.g. ANet will only review bug reports submitted through their official forum.

— Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 01:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Final follow-up

Unless there are objections, I'm going to archive all the exiting bug notes (except for localization) as follows:

1. Move the existing page to [Page (Unresolved (pre-Forum)]
2. Redirect each of the existing pages to the main bug page
3. Include a note at the top directing peoples to the bug report forum.
4. Include all the Archive Boxes (with links to existing archives and the new ones).
5. Include a note on the archive page (and talk) to ask peoples to avoid commenting.

I also think that we should lock (at least temporarily) most of the pages to discourage people from adding new notes/bugs/comments (but that decision can wait until we see what happens; perhaps no one will post anew). — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 19:15, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I varied the above process slightly:

1. I redirected all previous bug-report pages to the main page, which directs people to the forum.
2. On the main page, I put together a complete list of all archives listed on the main topic pages.
3. I created up to four archives for each of the seven topic areas:
   • Resolved, if the issue was formally or informally identified as resolved.
   • Reported, if formally noted by QA as reported.
   • Non-issue, if QA described it as such or if one/more reliable contributors explained how it was not really a bug. (I tried to avoid forcing my point of view: if in doubt, the item went into the next page).
   • Unknown status, if I could not quickly determine if the issue fit into one of the above statues.
4. The most controversial decision I mad was to not archive something if it was reported as moved to another bug report page. That's not strictly policy, but given the huge number of items...I think we are fine with just having the item in one of the archives.

Remaining steps:

• The archives could be locked...or we can just do what we always do with archives: revert and redirect people to the right place.
• The template I used for introducing each archive page needs some tweaking (but no particular rush to that, I think). It needs to properly identify the page name by parsing the URL and not put itself into the bug report archive category (shouldn't be too hard).
• Someone (or many someones) might want to spot check that I didn't do anything too st00pid (I did almost archive the misc bugs to the quest page and then overwrite them...but tragedy was averted.)
• Other than that, I think we can consider bug reporting moved to the forum and archived at long last.

Optional steps:

• There are a huge number of bugs listed the seven archives for unknown status. Some of the bugs are old, but a few are within the last 12 months. It might be worth reviewing them to see if any are worth reporting on the forum (or already have been reported), in which case, they really ought to be moved from unknown to reported.

— Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 03:39, 5 August 2011 (UTC)