Make All Your Help Tickets Private??

GamingMegaverse
GamingMegaverse
edited October 2015 in Bug Reports
I recently made the following comment
"So, after a flurry of activity to fix one issue (which is not completely fixed, as some still have the same issue with email invites) things have returned to the complete lack of attention.
Still 100s of tickets open.
Still there are things broken.
Tomorrow is the 2 year anniversary of the Reforge- we still don't have half of the items promised, and we still have things broken that were never repaired, 2 years later.
The only reason I have not left is the effort to move my 1000+ page wiki is herculean, but right now I really regret not starting 2 years ago, because it would be moved and I would not have wasted all of this time trying to get both previous owners (16 months) and current owners (8 months) to do the things that were promised."

I received the following response from Alex "There are still hundreds of tickets open, but there are also hundreds of private tickets that have been resolved as well (many people submit things privately for various reasons and so these results are not seen by the community at large)."
So it seems that while there are hundreds of tickets that they do not address on the public side, there are hundreds of resolutions on the private side.
Is anyone seeing this as reality? Should I make all of my help tickets private?
Please let me know if you are having better luck on private tickets!

Just trying to help out.

Comments

  • bluesguy
    bluesguy
    Posts: 127
    Please do not do this because this will just flood an over worked system.
  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998
    @bluesguy- Since you are a council member, perhaps then you could speak to the statement that hundreds of private tickets have been fixed, while the public tickets have had maybe 20 closed in 3 months. If this is the case, I will make all my tickets private, now, and I don't care if the system is overworked. If it is not the case, then it should be stated that hundreds is false. Which is it?

    Just trying to help out.

  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998
    Someone must have made a private ticket for the videos, since they are now fixed! Thanks SkidAce for the joke, and making me laugh.

    Just trying to help out.

  • bluesguy
    bluesguy
    Posts: 127
    @killervp - I am a council member. Here is what I have seen:

    1. We don't have a good bug fixing process. This means.
    1a. How many bugs are in the system
    1b. What is the state of every bug
    1c. What is the priority and severity of every bug
    1d. Who is assigned to fix each and every bug
    1e. What is the bug fix rate
    1f. What is the process for triaging bugs

    2. We still do not have transparency concerning the current bug fixing process
    2a. We are not publishing any useful information about any of the above items because we don't have them.

    Until this week I did not have anymore access to the Help system than any other user. I have it now. I have asked for some information so that we can get a process in place and get people fixing bugs on a regular basis.

    To answer the specific question you have asked "statement that hundreds of private tickets have been fixed, while the public tickets have had maybe 20 closed in 3 months". I can speculate why this is. Maybe many of those private bugs were part of a common issue and when one was fixed a bunch of them were fixed as well. Maybe they were the 'please reset my password/account' type issues. I don't know.
  • bluesguy
    bluesguy
    Posts: 127
    @killervp (and anyone else) - If you decide to do this "I will make all my tickets private", i.e. you are duplicating your existing public tickets, please close out the existing ones so that we are not chasing the same thing twice.
  • ketherian
    ketherian
    Posts: 203
    Eep.

    Hey bluesguy. The fact that there is no bug tracking system in place is, quite frankly, terrifying.
    Without a system in place "private bugs" could be the bugs programmers noted or reported they fixed that weren't associated with a ticket.

    Good luck. I do hope you get a system in place.
    Where I work, we use JIRA. It's not perfect, but it is highly configurable and web-based.

    -
    Ketherian
    "Signs & Portends":swtwc.obsidianportal.com
  • bluesguy
    bluesguy
    Posts: 127
    @ketherian - There is a bug tracking tool and people are using it to submit bug reports (good news). The problem is that a bug fixing *process* is broken (bad news). Those are two different things.

    You can enter tickets and they go into the ticketing system. Then there is some kind of 'black box' decision making done to determine what gets fixed and when. That is what the Inner Council wants to fix. We fix that then everyone will get to see what is going on.

    Yes I know about JIRA and a number of other tools we could use. Right now the decision has been made to stay with the bug tracking tool we have. Part of it is legacy. Part of it is to keep it simple for the community - people know the current system. Part of it is cost.
  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998
    @bluesguy "To answer the specific question you have asked “statement that hundreds of private tickets have been fixed, while the public tickets have had maybe 20 closed in 3 months”. I can speculate why this is. Maybe many of those private bugs were part of a common issue and when one was fixed a bunch of them were fixed as well. Maybe they were the ‘please reset my password/account’ type issues. I don’t know."
    There are lots of those types of tickets publicly as well- so I am still wondering about the validity of the statement.

    Just trying to help out.

  • Unknown
    Woah - so, let me address this.

    When I made the reference to the privately submitted tickets it was only to show progress was still happening. The reasons there is some progress on those as opposed to the publicly facing tickets is precisely the reason KVP mentions in his last comment on here - they are not typically development issues and so I am able to resolve them with more basic tools that do not require programming to get done. It was not meant as "we are doing sneaky stuff behind closed doors." As BG mentions, I am working with the Council to see about ways we can open this up more and allow more transparency on things. Some of that will require a new support system, but before we jump to enhancing that we want to get through catch up that is in play.

    So, again, it was more to advise that while there are still lingering issues and a lot of tickets (of which there are many duplicates in those 100s of open public tickets) we are still making progress and doing all we can to support out member base. Getting our Community Ambassadors extended access to the support system is also a part of this, as going solo at the items it is still a difficult task to manage the full flow. This gives us another layer of support to clear out things that just require and answer or explanation as opposed to requiring admin tools or programmers (as we get a whole lot of these too).

    I am very sorry that this caused such a level of confusion or frustration, I certainly didn't intend for that to be the case. I was simply trying to remain transparent and show that progress is still going on even if the programming issues are coming along slower than any of us like (and why we setup that enhancement to the tech team as well as getting that meeting in with Micah to let the programmers pick his brain).

    As a final thought to what BG mentions, a last part about upgrading the ticket system (as I addressed above a little) is about development time when we have major issues like email and uncompleted KS goals still sitting on the table. It is hard to justify focusing on the reporting system when the core of the site has these kinds of issues.
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