new bug tracker and how to post a bug report - (added link)

[lucid]

Please use the stickied release specific thread at the top of this forum to report bugs for the time being.

Hello everyone,

We have a bug tracker now. This one seems to have a user-centric focus, which is good, since we have only one coder, and tons of users.

This should be the way you report bugs from here on out.

We will start out with a general account that anyone can use to log in(from our tests it works fine with multiple logins from many locations at one time), and keep it that way unless it becomes a problem with vandalism or requiring more information from the reporting user on a regular basis. Please read the rest of the instructions in this post before posting a bug report to ensure that we don't delete your report for lacking important information

edit: new link will take you straight to Spriter page:

You can login at Spriter's page on debugle with

username: bugtester@brashmonkey.com

password: bugtester

the interface is very simple. Just look through the current bugs, and make sure yours is not already there, and then type a description in the 'new issue' green box, and submit

if you want to add something extra to an existing bug like the image below, where I added that this seems to happen only for sprites, just click on the expanding arrow to the write, and type in your additional information in the update issue box.:

Your bug report should contain as much information as possible, in order for me to be able to reproduce the bug.

The following are examples of useful and not useful bug reports, not necessarily actual bugs.

Useful:

[*:3dvgbn0z]Spriter crashes when I drag an object from the objects in frame window onto the canvas.
[*:3dvgbn0z]Sometimes when I reparent items using reparenting view in canvas Spriter will deparent everything. This doesn't seem to happen in the bone hierarchy view. Seems to only happen after cloning an animation.
[*:3dvgbn0z]Spriter seems to slow down over time. If I open up the same project that was performing slowly after restarting Spriter, everything is smooth again.

Not Useful

[*:3dvgbn0z]Spriter crashes all the time.
[*:3dvgbn0z]Undo doesn't work right
[*:3dvgbn0z]This is so frustrating. Sprites just keep messing up

Also, if you believe your project has an example of a bug that can be seen immediately upon loading, or you believe the save file has become corrupted, feel free to post a link to the zipped project folder, or if you don't want it to be available to anyone but me, email it to me at lucid@brashmonkey.com, with a note about which bug report it's related to.

There are bugs, there are probably crashes hidden in there, and the program is not complete. I know this can lead to frustration sometimes, but the bug tracker is not meant to vent frustrations. If I can go to the bug tracker and go through bugs in order, and reproduce each bug, I can fix them quickly. If I have to sift through vague bug reports, it will take longer for Spriter to get to where we all want it to be.

Also, thank you to all of our testers and users. So far most of the bugfixes in each new version have been found by you, and your reports in the forums have been what helped me squash them. This bug tracker should help streamline the process, and help to get Spriter to full stability as quickly as possible.

[crazysam]

This is good, but I think having an in-app bug reporter is much more useful. Especially because you can intercept unhandled exceptions and query the user what they were doing that caused the exception. I've seen this done in the open source project Git Extensions and I was very impressed (pleased).

Consider this approach, it might require a bit of effort upfront, but having all your users report bugs and crashes could be a great asset to speed up development (not to mention you could get call stacks with each report).

Great job so far guys, cheers!