Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 11 Aug 2007 Posts: 29

I am having mixed luck with the bug reporting tool.

I am positive that sometimes it does not report the bug - because it tells me that it could not do so....no explanation...just that it cannot complete the process.

In other instances, it says 'Preparing bug report' or something similar, and then it just goes away - no lingering 'success' message.

It would be nice if successful bug reports were indicated (or better yet, assigned a ticket# we could follow up on).

Rich

Magician Joined: 25 Oct 2000 Posts: 461 Location: USA

I was actually curious if there was a public interface to the bug database as well. I'm guessing there are a lot of duplicated reports, or worse bugs that go unreported because it isn't always easy to tell what has been reported and what hasn't beyond searching the forums. The 2.0 release will potentially cause forum explosion :)

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 5:10 pm

Right now the crash dumps go into a giant database. The crash dump contains a couple of CRC fields that uniquely identify the error, and also the location in the code. Our database automatically groups errors with the same CRC values, so if 1,000 people report the exact same crash, it only gets appended to a single database record. It also groups the crashes by location so I can identify "similar" crashes in the same area of the code.

I only send personal responses to the "Send Feedback" option, which I handle just like normal email. I don't normally respond to crash dump reports unless I need additional information about the crash. There are just too many for me to respond to. If I did that, then I wouldn't have any time left to actually program and fix bugs.

I cannot make the crash dumps public. This is because they contain information that some people might consider as private. Also, trust me...most people wouldn't be able to figure out anything useful from these crash dumps. They are very cryptic and making them publicly available would only benefit a very small number of people and isn't worth the effort involved. I dabbled with that in zMUD several years ago with the Mantis web-based bug system, and I needed a system better designed for giving me detailed crash information instead. The current system makes it *much* easier for me to find and fix bugs compared to the old system, even though the old system was public. But what matters is anything that makes it easier for me to fix bugs.

Often times, many different crash dumps are related to a single bug. There is no way for you to look at the crash dumps to determine if a bug is already reported. In fact, I prefer that people just send all of their crash dumps no matter what. When I see that a particular bug causes a lot more reports, then that bug gets higher in the priority queue for fixing.

Anyway, if you want a ticket number for followup, then just send normal email to support@zuggsoft.com, or use the Send Feedback method. That stuff all gets a tracking number with our HelpDesk system. Crash dumps should be a "send and forget" kind of system that makes it really easy for you to send them, and really easy for me to handle and fix without me needed to respond to each one.

Yes, 2.0 will cause a "forum explosion". But new versions always do that, so this isn't anything different. We've been doing new versions for over 10 years now, so I'm used to it.

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 5:12 pm

Oh, and back to the original poster: Are you using any sort of firewall or proxy server? Make sure you have set up your firewall and proxy server in Internet Explorer, or using the Internet control panel on your computer. Our crash dump system uses the proxy settings stored for Internet Explorer to try and send the report to our server.

If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure what is wrong. The crash dump system is limited in how fancy it can be. The idea is that when the crash dump runs, your program has just crashed and everything is in an unstable state. So the crash dump system has to be very careful to only do stuff that it can do reliably without causing additional crashes. It's pretty tricky.

Magician Joined: 25 Oct 2000 Posts: 461 Location: USA

Ahh... a mantis-like system was exactly what I had in mind, but you're right - those systems are not suited for crash dumps, nor is there any value in the public being able to see those (and least not until you go open source. hahahahah). Bring on the forum explosion! :)