Unreal Engine Bug Submission Workflow Issue

Hi all,

Is there any way we can get an update to to the bug reporting workflow sometime soon? When I put in a bug, I get an email that says:

“Thank you for your bug submission. We will review your case and will follow up if more information is needed or a ticket is created. In the event the issue you reported is scheduled for a future release or has known workarounds, you may not receive a follow-up message from our team.”

Putting in a bug seemingly does NOT automatically create an ticket/issue that can be tracked in the user that put in the bug? Why is this? As far as I understand right now, I manually have to check the issues.unrealengine.com link manually every so often just to see if my bug was actually a bug and what the resolution was. AND the bug’s title/description can change from what the user put in themselves. How is the user supposed to follow along with this workflow?

This would be a much better user experience if these bugs immediately generated a link for the user where they could see the current status of the bug report and a thread of correspondence with the Epic team if necessary.

Hello,

From 2018-2020 I worked on the team that received user-submitted bug reports. There is a lot of extra work that goes into creating a ticket/issue. (Testing it in previous engine version, current engine version, and ‘latest’ (Main branch compiled daily)) So that’s why it’s not automatically created.

If I created a bug from a user report I would always send them the link. Or, if it was a duplicate of something that already exists, I would make that issue public on the tracker and send them that.

I would be very disappointed if I learned that now user-submitted bugs are being entered into the bug tracking database without letting the user know, but let’s hope that is not the case.

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Hi @Astrotronic,

Thanks for the reply I appreciate you guys responding. I understand the additional work that needs to be done in order to actually test/validate a reported bug, but it makes a lot more sense to me to immediately send a link to a created ticket/tracking item to the user as soon as they create the ticket. If the reporting worked this way, there would be no need for a human to manually hand the link to the created bug URL.

If you guys need to do all of that additional work of testing in previous engine version, current engine version etc. it would be great to see that from the user’s perspective anyway. At least that way the user can easily see and track every update (in a sort of activity log of the ticket), and can follow along.

I understand there may be some issues with malicious users creating / spamming tickets, but perhaps you could introduce levels of permissions among the reporting system?

Perhaps every user is by default a “level 1” bug reporter that can’t comment on their ticket after it’s created (without approval at least), and can only report 1 bug per day or something?
Then after a user has put in a valid report, they are upgraded to “level 2” where they can comment on their tickets and can report unlimited bugs per day?
This approach would move the “human” developer workload to be actually validating good accounts so they can be upgraded to “level 2” (and filtering out bad accounts) rather than just having to copy/paste URLs to users.

Just hoping to move you guys forward in this regard because it feels extremely archaic the way it works right now.

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Good suggestions. Relatively recently Epic switched to ‘Discourse’ (The forum platform we’re talking on right now) and you can see the beginnings of a somewhat different bug reporting approach in the UEFN section where bugs are reported and statuses are communicated via forum posts. (Although I prefer the more structured/direct view via issues.unrealengine site). So, I think the potential for evolution is there.

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Yeah I certainly see the utility of the forum post approach, at least the user can see the bug activity and the lot. But yeah I definitely agree that clogging up a forum like this with bug reports has its downsides as well.

Anyways, in terms of moving this proposal forward and getting this information to the bug reports team, are you able to relay this information to them (I know you mentioned you’re off of that team now)? Or perhaps there is somewhere/someone I can relay this information for that team that’s better than here?

Would love to be able to put that in and be able to see if that’s something you guys are interested in working on / are actively working on at any given time.

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I just moved this thread from “Issues & Bug Reporting” section to “Feedback & Requests” section.

I’d encourage anyone to ‘vote’ (upper left) on this to raise visibility.

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