Suggestion for Minimal Public Access to Issue Tracking

[wesleyb]

Known Situation

I am aware of the following:

• Serif code is not open-source, so direct public access to an internal issue tracking software is not likely.
• The forum itself is not suitable for bug tracking.
• The forum is not used as an issue tracker by Serif.

A forum, for non-tecnical bug reports, is understandable, because a user may produce a wall of text, that must be parsed, tested, and converted into a technical bug report.

Request / Suggestion

Provide the users access to a pre-filtered view of the issue tracking. I.e. users would be permitted some or all of the the following:

• see list of issues
• see platform of issue
• see related milestone
• see kind of issue (feature, bug, defect)
• see status of issue (in progress, queued, backlog, pending review)
• see date of last activity on issue
• subscribe to activity

But, users would not be permitted the following:

• view internal communication about issue
• comment on bug

Benefits

1. Managing forum posts, that discuss the same bug, could then be as simple as linking to a single bug report.
2. Answering new forum posts, that ask about the status of an old known bug, could be as simple as linking to a single bug report.
3. Users can be informed clearly of known and unknown bugs, thus reducing requests or losing loyalty due to abandonment.
4. Status update posts, of project milestones, could be made with less effort.