In this case, however, it wouldn't be for normal users. I understand that the plan is for user created guilds to get them, but for now it would be useful if BYOND Help got one of their own.

There might be an issue because, at least initially, the main BYOND bug tracker was tied to BYOND Help as the guild's bugtracker. It looks like that may have been resolved and now the DreamMakers/Developers guild has two trackers of its own.

Well, we have a big issue with information requirement compliance, duplicate issues, and resolution status notification. The vast majority of time spent by those helping on BYOND Help is tackling these 3 issue, which the bug tracking system handles a lot better than the forums.

If you can think of some ways we can improve these issues with the current system I'd love to hear them. We, of course, want to make things easier on the end user, but it seems the easier we make it for the end user the harder it is for the person trying to help.

Someone in the past suggested a browser plugin distributed with BYOND that would automatically give basic system information for the bug tracker, I think the idea mostly got shot down but something like this would save us a ton of 'Please fill out the form correctly' replies(which account for at least 4/5th of first replies in BYOND Help).

Helping the end user is important, but keeping the attention of those who can help them is equally, if not more important. BYOND Help fails without people who have the knowledge. And unfortunately, we're all not as humble and tolerant as Snagler.

I got very over replying the same things over and over and over again to different users who can't use a forum search to save their lives. So much so that I can't look at the "Software Problems" forum without cringing and immediately looking for something else to occupy my time.

The greasemonkey script does help a ton, but it really doesn't do a complete job. Marking duplicates, for example, would be a fantastic tool for the issues that come up in BYOND Help. As it stands our greasemonkey script does cover the most common issues(port forwarding probably being the most common), but what we are dealing with is issues, and the issue tracker is built to handle this best.

And once again resolution status notification is something we are really missing. We have a forum dedicated to resolved issues, but this breaks the forum search.

Looking through BYOND Help and Bug Reports, it strikes me how they are drastically similar in nature, and yet portrayed completely different.

I honestly don't have the attention span to read a lot of help forum posts any more. A long, long time of needing to reply with a pre-made response inserted into the page with Javascript tends to do that to you. I think I'd be able to do it a lot easier if the entire thing simply resembled bug reports.

Let's face it, we always need to know their browser, BYOND version, what the problem is, how they got the problem to begin with, and all of that other information. It'd be nice to have it formatted in a yellow box above the description of their problem.

(An added bonus is, on that rare occasion when a BYOND Help thread actually turns out to be a bug in the software, we can just move the post there for further analysis.)

The quickest quick fix I can think of is to let moderators change status on the help forum. And if that works out well, take it as a win. If not, at least something is in place to keep some order.

And added readability advantages make the idea of using that help forum so much more enticing. It's a lot harder to ignore text inputs than it is including it between HTML in a textarea. Especially if the form rejects posts for missing crucial information.

[Edit] Or even, take further advantage of your "Most helpful users" section. Grab say, the moderators, and any of the first ten most helpful users who aren't them, and you've got a reasonably active team. One that should be pretty good at being friendly and helpful.

Tom wrote:

I think at a minimum we should require the same tracker info for Help posts.

Indeed. The sticky in the help forum pretty much lays out a template for the exact same information. Give or take a few steps that should be common-sense to put in the problem description (like steps to reproduce it).

So the only other remaining issue is whether we want them to act more like the trackers with status inputs or like the dev stuff with voting.

I don't think the voting method will work in this situation. I love that more users are jumping into the help forums and trying to give a hand. But a lot of the time, they end up congesting the issue by going the wrong direction. Sometimes a problematic game isn't BYOND with permission issues, it's just a problematic game. That sort of thing.

With the tracker, they get to continue to help the way they do now. But if they start to go off in the wrong direction, it'll be easier to step in, correct them (and teach them a thing or two while we're at it) while assisting the user.

Not to mention things like: "BYOND Refuses to connect to games (Resolved: Firewall issue)" might persuade a few users towards checking their Firewalls first.

Mikau wrote:

The status of an issue shouldn't be set to resolved until it's confirmed that it is actually resolved. Which brings up the note that we might be able to force some users to come back and actually say "Hey, this is fixed." I found the most annoying part of helping people on the forum was that they would just disappear and you had no idea if they fixed their problem and are happily playing a game, or if your advice somehow blew their computer up and killed them in the process.

Indeed! Moving posts to "resolved" was always tricky business. 'Cause you never actually knew if it was, unless the problem was so drastically easy that it couldn't be anything else.

If someone makes a ticket for help, it should remain in their notifications without them having the ability to remove it until the ticket status is set to resolved. That way it will be a constant reminder that they need to come back and give us an indication as to what's going on.

Status: Awaiting Reply

With this comes leaving the BYOND Atom red. I always feel unsettled when the atom is red, it means something relevant to me is going on and I'm not aware of it, so I always endeavour to remove it as soon as I login. And I imagine it's the same for a lot of users.