Showdown bug report account

[GatoDelFuego]

I've noticed there are several people that make accounts specifically for reporting bugs on Pokemon Showdown. Would it be possible/worth it to consider an account built specifically for people that wish to only report bugs, possibly linked through showdown? Or distributing the account information and restrict its access to the bug reports thread? This may invite horrible spamming or go against smogon's doctrine of recruiting as many accounts as possible, but would it be worth it to prevent pointless accounts from being made?

 

[Woodchuck]

What disadvantage is there to having people create accounts in order to report bugs?

 

[GatoDelFuego]

There's not really any disadvantages, but there's not really any advantages either. Smogon has a huge lurker population, and people are never going to use these accounts again. It just seems pointless to require people to create accounts that are never going to be touched by anyone.

 

[Cathy]

Some sort of shared account wouldn't be the usual way to implement this. The usual way would be to allow guest posting in the bug report thread. I don't believe vbulletin has an easy way to allow guest posting in a single thread, but that itself is not an insurmountable obstacle.

Allowing guest thread in the bug report thread is something I have thought about the merits of before this thread. Making a forum account actually seems to be a big barrier to entry for a lot of Pokemon Showdown users. I often have users PM me bug reports, and they say it's too much trouble for them to post on the forum. This isn't ideal, because it increases the chances of bug reports being "lost". On the other hand, many bugs PMed to me are invalid anyway, so on the whole it might be a wash.

Smogon has a long history of not allowing any guest posts and it does invite spam, as well as restrict the number of people who can deal with rulebreakers (since ordinary moderators can't directly ban IPs). Overall, it's not clear whether it would be a net benefit.

 

[MeteorMiss]

It would probably be a better idea to create a Showdown-based place to report bugs. That way, people could simply report bugs using their Showdown names, rather than creating one-time Smogon names.

 

[tehy]

So here's an idea: Why not just make a quick command /reportbug?

The way this would work is it would redirect you to a page where it'd first ask:Is your bug any one of these:

Here would be common misreports (Zoroark Illusion, which even messed me up) and already known bugs. If it's any of these and you click yes, an explanation message pops up, either "It's not a bug" or "thank you we're trying to fix this as fast as possible".

If it's "none of the above", then they can write a message with a subject that would go to some showdown-based message system, or just send an email to an actual email account, or work some kind of a system out (Whatever works for the staff). I don't pretend to have this part solved.

This would invite some spamming, unfortunately. So there's 2 options:

1: Accept that there will be some spamming, and if there's too much, the IPs can be banned in any case. The system could group names/Ips together for convenience if so desired. Besides, anyone who wants to spam PS usually does so and then gets banned 10 seconds later. I guess it could happen, but I tend to think anyone who bothers with this will get caught spamming on a lower level.

2: Make it mods/voice only. The problem I have here is that this kind of takes away from the accessibility and mods already have this kind of access often. Voices less so but still. The cool thing here is that you can have quick bug reports without users feeling intimidated or such.

 

[sandshrewz]

Hide

So here's an idea: Why not just make a quick command /reportbug?

The way this would work is it would redirect you to a page where it'd first ask:Is your bug any one of these:

Here would be common misreports (Zoroark Illusion, which even messed me up) and already known bugs. If it's any of these and you click yes, an explanation message pops up, either "It's not a bug" or "thank you we're trying to fix this as fast as possible".

If it's "none of the above", then they can write a message with a subject that would go to some showdown-based message system, or just send an email to an actual email account, or work some kind of a system out (Whatever works for the staff). I don't pretend to have this part solved.

This would invite some spamming, unfortunately. So there's 2 options:

1: Accept that there will be some spamming, and if there's too much, the IPs can be banned in any case. The system could group names/Ips together for convenience if so desired. Besides, anyone who wants to spam PS usually does so and then gets banned 10 seconds later. I guess it could happen, but I tend to think anyone who bothers with this will get caught spamming on a lower level.

2: Make it mods/voice only. The problem I have here is that this kind of takes away from the accessibility and mods already have this kind of access often. Voices less so but still. The cool thing here is that you can have quick bug reports without users feeling intimidated or such.

I think the main thing here is whether the advantage of having such a bug report system on PS outweighs the disadvantage of having to register accounts etc. However, there is little to no disadvantage of the current way bug reports are done. When people post in the bug reports thread, other people can swoop in to confirm the same bug or otherwise prove that it isn't a bug or it's already known. By submitting tickets / bug reports the way you suggested, if it's not in a public place, the relevant PS staff have to sift through it themselves. It's probably just going to overcomplicate things though :o

As for Gato's suggestion itself, there might not always be a point where people register only to report bugs etc and not touch them forever but that's not always the case. See case: Oglemi who initially made an account to post in the SOC thread in C&C iirc :p

 

[chaos]

i streamlined the registration process quite a bit, so hopefully it wont be a burden now