Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:38:31 UTC
I (an administrator at Wikimedia Commons) are tired to forward bug messages for Upload Wizard because *I know* it isn't too difficult automatically sending error reports if something goes wrong. Google does it (e.g. on Google docs; they even have an error report tool where you can select the the element showing-up wrongly), my scripts promt the user before (just not to break confidence) why is UploadWizard not able to do this? Because Krinkle (Bug 35333), Neil & Co. don't want to get spammed with thousands of reports and rely on crowd that will hopefully sort it out? No. I will ban UpWiz error-comminity-to-dev support. Cheers Rillke
(In reply to comment #0) > why is UploadWizard not able to do this? Because Krinkle (Bug > 35333), Neil & Co. don't want to get spammed with thousands of reports Surprised? Of course I will not spit through 1000s of messages of which many will be duplicates, invalid reports, stuff not related to anything in that context, and what not. Why? Because there is more useful things to spend time on for a developer. (In reply to comment #0) > and rely on crowd that will hopefully sort it out? I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying we rely on the crowd now? In a way we do, but nobody is demanding that from you. If you want to help test things and report bugs, that's great. If you don't believe that that is useful, or if you don't like writing reports, or simply want to spend time on something else - that's completely fine. Whatever the case, I think your reports have been great and very useful. (In reply to comment #0) > error reports if something goes wrong. Google does it (e.g. on Google docs; > they even have an error report tool where you can select the the element > showing-up wrongly), The comparison to Google. So, that report tool is nice indeed, but lets not forget what it cost Google to get that: * A lot of developer time and effort into creating such a feedback mechanism. It may look simple, but I've looked into it a few times and there is a LOT of stuff going on to make it work. Certainly not a small feature. * They (most likely) have a communications team that deals with all these reports and have (semi-automated?) applications that organize all the massive amounts of input with filters to look for patterns and/or similar reports etc.. And then forward/convert some to the issue tracker of their developers. * They don't have to deal with the fact that feedback in the wiki context is not as easy to deal with as feedback in the context of a service from a company. The reason is because, on a wiki, feedback is usually about the content and for the community, not about the software. And even then, in our case the software in question can be software developed locally in a gadget, as an extension, or from MediaWiki core. So there's a lot of factors to deal with. The simplest way to incorporate this on the short-term would be to extend the Feedback Dashboard. But that would still send it to the community.. --- Also, bug 35333 is (currently) about catching exceptions. In general the kinds of errors that yield useful bug reports are not the kind of errors that throw exceptions. Because an application should never throw exceptions, and when it does it is usually something the application can't do anything about (e.g database connection). An app should take care of any and all error cases and report them to the user in an understandable way - whether or not with an option to report the error (depending on the type of error). Whether from exceptions or from an error-msg, doing this automatically is possible and I would love to see that happen!
If there would be an auto reporter it has to be a generic one for all extensions+core, why should so much dev time be wasted for just one extension? Moving to general.
