Dear Steemit Developers -- About Our Bug Reports. Help!
Hello Steemit developers!
At the end of this comment is a bug report I left in the middle of another web page tonight.
After doing so, I went hunting around for the proper place to report bugs. It seems I need to go to Github and open an account there, and that some others that have not done so have simply made posts like this one anouncing their bug for any interested party to see and hopefully help deal with the matter.
Sending Steem Inc.'s thousands of clients (Steemit users) to go open accounts at Github broadcasts an unfortunate implicit message and hurts company branding, in my opinion.
Only slightly less bad for the brand are the six-plus posts (most dated "last year") I found tonight where people seem to have decided that the only way they found to report a bug was to make a regular Post (like this one) about it. This does not look great, and here's why.
At any of my web sites, if I wa nt people to report stuff I have a notice that says "If you wish to report/request X click here". On clicking there, a form opens up. They fill out the form and click on "Submit". End of story!
There are some programming geniuses working on Steem and Steamit, as well as amnong the users. I know that they can do the same thing here. Could we have this here please? If it is here aready and I just missed it, I apologize and I will delete my post ASAP.
Here is my comment of tonight, which deals with a problem I had this morning.
"Hello! I apologize for the multiple repetitions of my comments, which occurred this morning. This situation represents a protocol/program bug in the Steamit software.
This bug has one of two forms. (1) The error message about "transmission error" should not be such as to lead the user to believe that the transmission needs to be resubmitted. That is, it needs to be accompanied by additional text telling the submitter what to do. (2) Once the system has a particular submission on board, it should be able to check whether submission is identical to one received a few minutes earlier from the same sender and addressed to the same recipient, and simply ignore it. That is, it hould not allow the message to show up twice on users' screens.
Of course this message does not belong on this page; but I put it here in case someone at this page is in contact with the developers and can alert them to the problem."
Thanks for your report, but we actually use GitHub to develop all of this software that runs the site and to parcel out the work to the team, so unless it's an issue in GitHub, it basically doesn't exist in our universe. For any issue to be worked on, it needs to be there.
Thanks sneak. I know you use Github for the work, and I am familiar with Github. Still, as a fellow business owner, I would not ask my clients to get over there and open an account merely to report a problem they feel is a software bug, when the client-friendly alternative is a piece of cake to create and use.
Here's the solution.
First assemble a team of volunteers (people like me who are just ordinary Steemians but who have some experience with software development) to check what comes in when Steemians report a problem by clicking on a 'Report Bug Here' button that is on every page displayed. (Your software simply has to send all those filled-out-forms to a standard email address. Also, the button code would have the usual 'I'm not a robot' barrier to stop bad guys.)
The volunteers organize themselves to receive and prioritize bug reports, and even get back to the submitters where they suspect it's not a bug but rather a user issue, or (even more important) to get details the developers might need.
The volunteers get over to Github and keep the Steemians' list up to date for developers' use.
Here's one beauty of this solution. The volunteers can keep track of work on the reports, and create feedback to Steemians (perhaps a weekly report on one web page) about the developers' progress. This is beautiful public relations by Steem Inc., i think.
To get this program going, we invite people to volunteer, and the developers vet those who come forward to make sure they have enough experience to be really helpful in screening reports from Steemians.
Ned incentivizes the volunteers by periodically giving volunteer X a certain number of Steem Power units depending on that person's volume of reports to the developers and feedback to those whose reports they either reject or get elaborated. That is, Ned pays them for documented work output from his monster cache of coins, so no sweat for him to do that, and he is not throwing out those coins into the wind and hoping they do good for Steem Inc.
Cheers.
I think perhaps you overestimate the size of our organization.
No sneak! All that work I talked about is to be done by the volunteers, who will be ordinary Steemians, not members of the organization.
I understand that there are nearly 30,000 inputs from Steemians daily. My group of volunteers could be as small as 3 people.