Today, Cranky Users, I swore that I wasn't going to post a diary, and I begged Nurse Kelley to be sure to post so we would have an open thread to express our crankiness. But the more I read stuff, the more I thought, I don't know much about the process of reporting bugs and getting actual technical help (as opposed to cranky peer technical help such as we share here!), and maybe I'm not the only one. So -- this should be quick, at least to write, and if you already know all about it, then just scroll on down and play in the comments if you like!
We all know that the big orange stripe at the very, very top of each page has a link to the bug report form on the right. If you have never looked at it, I'll show it to you, in pieces because my little netbook screen can only take so much in a screenshot. Here's the topmost part:
Main point: if you want to say that some aspect of Daily Kos does not work correctly, this is the form for you. If you want to say that you don't understand how to work some aspect of the site, and need advice, this is NOT the form for you! We'll look at the other form after this one.
Main point here: because of the volume of bug reports being submitted (and the need to spend time working on them), they are NOT promising to respond to every bug report directly, to acknowledge its receipt or say what the problem is. They promise to look at them all and work on them in order of urgency. Your email is only so that, if they have further questions about your report, they can contact you. If you want to know what's going on with bugs, follow elfling, read her update diaries, and comment in the thread. (We do republish them here, but you'll see them faster if you follow her yourself.)
Main point: the more detail you can supply, the easier it is for the developers to tell what's wrong. If you're seeing something you want to report, please note down the exact error message, the url, maybe take a screenshot, and describe exactly what you were doing that led up to the error. If you can try it again and get it to repeat, OR NOT, that is also good information. When someone at work calls me and says "I have an error message!", and I say, "What does it say?", and they say, "I don't know! Something about an error!!!". it makes belinda ridgewood cry.
Here's the rest of it, except for the Submit button. Notice that they make you pinkie-swear that you understand each of these rights as they've explained them to you that you may not get a personal response.
Now, here's the tech support form, which has other uses as well:
This time, they do need your email address to contact you. You'll want to click the Tech Support button, and after that, your entry is pretty free-form. The link to tech FAQ is not especially current, and (completely off the topic of tech support) the list of front-page authors to contact is charmingly, nostalgically obsolete.
Update: In a comment below, Gabriel D gives good advice on how to add more detail, such as a screenshot, to your bug report or tech support form:
Upload to an image hosting site and paste the URL to it in the report.
Or post it in a diary or comment and give them the URL of those instead. We did that a lot during beta, especially on some of the more complex or weird bugs. Post a diary or comment with a long description of the problem, then send a bug report with a short summary and send them to the diary/comment/thread for all the gory details.
So that's it! Now you don't need to be afraid to click because you don't know what they'll ask you. It's true that many, many bugs have already been reported, but it's good for them to know a) how many people are impacted by them, and b) that a bug is not fixed, if they maybe think it is. So do what feels right to you!
I have two other observations that have made me laugh today. One is, as usual, I'm writing this diary on the fly and, the first time I clicked Preview, I forgot to enter any tags. Also the next ten times I clicked Preview, because apparently, at least for me right now, the requirement to enter at least one tag before you can preview/save has been lifted.
The other one is, I've spent all week writing these diaries and tending the comment threads. Each one has gotten on the reclist, if only briefly, and now if I look at my poor little bars of mojo, so inferior to those of Nurse Kelley and many other popular writers, they are a little bigger! So I was very surprised to go read another diary after lunch and notice that I have lost TU since this morning. I think this is hilarious, although I'll be very glad to receive your gracious recs if you choose, because I did dig that little badge. But to all the people this week saying they'd lost TU, I totally see what you mean!