Why not have the new bug reporting form automatically create an answerhub topic eh. Start title with bug tracker id, and have a link to it and the description
Best of Both worlds !
Seriously that must be possible to do, not sure if answerhub has an api for that. You do have webdev staff at epic right?
Where the public bug tracker has an answerhub thread, with the big button on top, it works great.
So why not have this for all of them, and use that to report back to submitter, ask further info (in addition to emailing) etc.
You can then disable new manual posts in answer hub section, and show big graphic link to bugtracker here and everywhere else.
Additional bug reporting community tips:
Make all bugs submitted public immediately and automatically (see above), add a verifying category in the tracker or something.
Maybe a ‘submitted by’ field with the answerhub epic acount profile, automatically filled in when logged in, optional checkbox to exclude this.
Gameify submissions ! See Wilberolive’s comment above….
Especially for the ‘by design’ resolution, put some feedback about the reasoning in the linked answerhub thread.
@DenKuzn not sure if it has anything to do with your light issues but lights changed in 4.19 somewhat, I noticed while glancing over the 4.19 release notes.
@**FrederickD: **yes, yes, and yes - all of this sounds great to me too. The new form is a disaster - I’m sure it was built to fix one problem, but the cost vs benefits tradeoff is way off, at least from the perspective of the community. As just one example, here’s an experience I had with it not too long ago:
found a bug, submitted it, then was totally confused because I had no way to look at the submission, no email confirmation, etc.
After a day or two I had just about convinced myself that maybe the bug submission had silently failed to record the bug, when I happened to notice it had been filed on issues.unrealengine.com. Of course the bug title and description were different, but it was enough of the same bug that I could confirm it was the I filed.
But wait! The bug wasn’t written up quite right and an important (IMO) detail in the ticket was wrong. But there was nothing I could do about it, because I can’t comment on the bug entry.
I finally went and opened a new conversation on answerhub, trying to raise my concern with how the bug was written up. Nobody responded for a couple of weeks.
Finally someone from Epic responded, but not to address my question. Instead, they were writing to tell me that I should use the new bug submission form. Argh!
I replied and pointed out that I had done that, and that my answerhub post included that as well as the bug number, and that the bug submission form actually tells people to start a new conversation on answerhub about tickets if there needs to be discussion.
That was over a month ago, and neither the Epic person nor anybody else has responded.
To add one more bit of comedy/frustration, somewhere along the line I implemented a fix and submitted a pull request. While I was able to put the bug number in the pull request, there is no way to make the reverse cross reference - no way to mention in the bug writeup that there is a pull request available. I won’t bother starting yet another thread on answerhub for this of course. Lucky for me, the fix was accepted and included in 4.19. That’s great, but the bug is still marked as unresolved (and marked as won’t be fixed until 4.20, haha), and there’s no way for me to tell anyone that the problem is now gone (the only way I confirmed that the bug was fixed by pulling the latest source and seeing my change in there).
The whole experience was frustrating and definitely impacted my interest in trying to track down and fix bugs going forward. But like you pointed out, just a few minor changes to their process and bug tracker and it could be a whole difference experience.
I have like two pages of little bugs, and yeah some are more mini features, but make sense or are expected behaviour done elsewhere not implemented consistently… will be a day or two work to mention them properly, make pics/videos etc.
I posted two bug submissions. After a few days I got mails. One had the Issues link of one bug and one mail wants further repro steps for the other bug
I think your 2 posts to this thread exactly demonstrate [at least part of] the problem we’re talking about - you posted a bug, the devs want further info, and you had to come to the forums to try to figure out how to get that feedback to them. Doesn’t that strike you as at least somewhat broken? If nothing else, it seems completely different from literally every other bug tracker I’ve ever used.
I think the lack of any sort of 2-way communication totally misses the mark in a couple of ways: it creates problems like yours and mine where there’s no way to add clarifying details or respond to questions, and it spreads information around that really should belong in one place (it’s silly to say that we should talk about a bug in AnswerHub).
These are unnecessary problems that only discourage the community, and they also make it really hard to track down good info - countless times I’ve relied on the info in e.g. the github tracker for some project to
learn about a bug and find details on a workaround
hear why a dev says that something won’t be fixed (it’s infuriating to have a UE4 bug marked as “won’t fix / by design” without a single comment of why it’s the intended behavior or what the alternative “right” way to do things is - this happened to me just this morning in fact)
respond to a dev’s request for input on a new or a fix
I’m guessing the current form is the result of some other problem - maybe they were spending too much time on triage - but if so, the cure is worse than the disease and there are better solutions. Heck, if the problem is that they were just overwhelmed with garbage bugs, I’m sure the community would be happy to step in and act as a buffer - just doing first-line triage to weed out stuff that is obvious garbage. But again, we don’t really know, do we, since we can’t really get anyone from Epic to engage in a conversation about it.
You are right, it is unclear what happens if further details are needed. But contacting me directly goes into the right direction imo.
I mean okay, the last mail is already 3 days old and I haven’t received an answer after I sent a reproduced project. This could be improved indeed.
Definitely, although usually that’s just accomplished (in other trackers) by getting an email when someone posts a comment to the. But yeah, I agree, I’m glad they at least reached out to you.
I wish the back and forth with a bug submitter was made public - again, like it works in most trackers - because I’m sure we’ve all seen cases where we can easily reproduce a bug but the dev on the receiving side can’t easily reproduce it (if at all). But often somebody else who has the same problem will come along and chime in with an additional detail or a different way to reproduce the problem or some insight and then that’s enough for the dev to be able to reproduce it and fix it.
The Bug Submission Form has provided our team with more informative reports, allowing them to reproduce, file, and resolve issues more efficiently. We understand that it lacks collaborative and tracking elements for a wider audience, but it has solved other challenges we’ve experienced with tracking bugs on AnswerHub internally. If you’d like to see what input your fellow devs may have, then feel free to share your to AnswerHub as well.
In recent weeks, the form was shifted to a new backend. This doesn’t affect what you see, but it did simplify the process for the team, allowing them to more effectively communicate with submitters.
Most tickets receive a response, often resulting with either:
A direct link to the new on the public tracker,
A request for repro steps,
Notification of the bug being a duplicate, or
Notification of the “working as intended."
In the event of the latter, always feel free to post this to the Feedback for Epic thread. We, the community team, compile requests from here and pass them along to our dev teams. Down the line, we hope to build a more robust tool for reporting these requests.
Submissions that are unrelated to engine development, such as reports concerning Fortnite or spam, will immediately be closed with no notification.
Please understand that the Bug Submission Form has never been intended to be the “new AnswerHub.” It’s been implemented to help us push higher quality bugs through to our dev teams, while we work on a better, long-term solution.
