Retracting a bug

[Kent]

Sometimes when I enter a bug, part of my report is truncated due to my carelessness, or I put a typo in it, or something that makes me need to re-send it properly.

Could there be a command that enables the player to retract his bug report after he submits it?

[qinweiqi]

I think this would be a neat idea, but I also see problems with it. A player redacting a bug report on a bug that still exists is no good; so the system would need to keep a history of the bug report's original text, and possibly any number of changes. I suspect that would be cumbersome to program and more cumbersome to use. Also, it would probably need to flag the bug report as 'edited' or 'updated' so that GM's would need to check it again. Again, nifty if used correctly, very annoying if used improperly.

[Jirato]

A player redacting a bug report on a bug that still exists is no good; so the system would need to keep a history of the bug report's original text, and possibly any number of changes. I suspect that would be cumbersome to program and more cumbersome to use. Also, it would probably need to flag the bug report as 'edited' or 'updated' so that GM's would need to check it again. Again, nifty if used correctly, very annoying if used improperly.

Exactly. It'd be nice to have, but for the amount of effort it would take to implement properly with all the failsafes to avoid issues with the above, along with all the chaos that it would cause if such failsafes did not work properly, I don't see this happening. Sorry.

We'll manually close any duplicate bugs. We have a note-making system where if there are two or more bugs that are part of the same thing, we'll append notes to the more detailed one and close the others. This system seems to have been working fine for us, so I don't see any player-controlled bug editing features being added. I'd rather not have a player (either intentionally or unintentionally) remove important information/reports from the bug database. It's just too risky.

The most I can see possibly happening (and this isn't saying it is going to happen), is something that displays the text of the bug back to you and asks you to confirm it before it gets saved to the database. But then you have the issue of people not realizing that it is waiting for them to confirm it and thinking their report went through.

[Kent]

My thought is that removing a badly worded or incomplete bug would reduce GM annoyance.

Perhaps all that would be needed is a command that can eliminate only the bug someone just entered and that one only. For example, a persons submits several bug reports. Then he enters another bug report, but it is bungled, so he can then immediately enter Unbug Confirm and that will delete the bug he just entered, but prior bug reports have to remain as is and are not deleteable.

[Jaster]

Seems we might just benefit from a confirmation prompt.

Example:

bug I typed "hurl pow faylen" and it hurled the poo at me instead!

You entered: I typed "hurl pow faylen" and it hurled the poo at me instead!
Type BUG CONFIRM to submit your bug report.

Oh wait I meant "hurl poo faylen"! So I just retype the bug replacing pow with poo, then bug confirm if I'm satisfied with the new report.

[qinweiqi]

I believe that suggestion has been noted previously with the problem that some people would not notice the confirm prompt and log off before completing the bug. A programming fix for that might be adding a confirm all pending bug reports as part of the logout script, but I don't know how difficult/how much work that would be.

[Jaster]

Yay for reading! I retract my post.

[qinweiqi]

Sorry, didn't mean to be a snot and hope you didn't take me that way. What I have started doing when I experience a bugging fail is use bugcheck to get the bug# from my last bug, and reference it in my fix/addendum. (IE bug Add to bug #xxxx, <blah> or bug Replace spelling failz in bug #xxxx, <blah>)

That being said, I have thought a little about how an undo send could be implemented without an issue of people failing to confirm bugs, but I think it'd be horrific to program. The idea is have a bug undo command ("bugundo" because it sounds fun) that only functions for 60 or 120 seconds after a bug post. If the bug report isn't undone in that time period, it would be 'final'. If it does get undone, the bugundo command could be coded to set the bug just submitted as closed with a flag for closed by player, or it could be coded to simply discard the failed bug. However, how to make a command only viable for a two minute window, while making it able to handle the issue of a player posting two (or more) bugs within 2 minutes and wanting to undo only one of them (or even all of them), is something I'd not even like to think about how to do (and I think programming is fun!).

[Rias]

We're really not that worried about it. A simple "look over what you've written first before hitting Enter" should suffice, or if it's a big lengthy bug, write it out in a text editor first and copy it over when you're ready. If you occasionally realize "shoot, I forgot to add a detail" or whatever and need to submit the bug again, we're not going to burn you at the stake.

[Drayla]

Yeah, they only burn you if you weigh the same as a duck.