by Danny Gourley on Oct 26, 2006
That's Not a Bug, Now THIS is a Bug!
If you are ever annoyed by multiple threads about the bugs encountered
in-game, then this is a dev response you should read. Cathy_n QA
offers a response to a community member's request to post all bugs into
one ongoing thread:
From my perspective, since I'm one of the people who
compiles
bugs/complaints from the forums, I much prefer one thread per issue. I
understand that from a forum poster's perspective, you might want all
the bugs crammed into a 45 page thread so all the conversations can
have their own topics. It's a matter of preference, but it's also a
matter of what is going to get your issues the most attention.
The problem with stuffing every bug into a single thread is that
there's conversations ("That's not a bug") and side conversations
("Well if it's not a bug it should be") and quotes of side
conversations ("Can I get you some cheese with that whine?") within the
thread and eventually some critical event horizon is passed after which
the thread is mostly noise and not much signal. Then, two months down
the road somebody wants to know "How could Turbine not know about this,
I posted about it in the bug thread". So I go look and sure enough
there's a six word sentence on page 25 that's something like "Oh BTW
<foo> still doesn't work" in the middle of a long post rebutting
quotes from 14 previous posters about 14 different issues. And yes,
this is hyperbole but stuff like it has happened before, which is why I
am wary of the mega-bug-post method of forum bug reporting.
It may be annoying to see all the threads, but it seems to be working. So, don't stop!