Following up on this thread:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/104433/#post-462929 [www.sidefx.com]

I have been on various CG forums (fora?) since 1998 and it is my preferred method to discuss issues as opposed to the chaotic monstrosity that is Discord.

I also disagree with SideFX's approach in aggressively locking threads that raise issues. This discourages participation, creates an sentiment of separation between SideFX and their userbase, and reduces public awareness to a specific issue.

I understand that the intention is to improve the software and that the best path is to report the issue. Surely, then it follows that the best approach is to have a forum admin then report that issue rather than locking the thread and taking no other action?

The ideal approach would be for the admin to report the issue and post that as an update in the thread, so the user is aware that the bug is now being officially tracked.

In an age of increasingly capable LLMs, they can possibly even tailor a pipeline to just restructure and automatically submit the post as a bug report and post the feedback in the same thread with a single click of a button.

It's obvious that straight up locking a thread is not a popular approach. I hope that SideFX can understand that creating animosity in their own forums and leaving it up to a disgruntled user to somehow overcome that negative emotion and still report the issue is not actually in the best interests of improving Houdini.

Vive la discussion!

An even better way would be to make the Bug/RFE tracker public and let us give comments (for clarification/workarounds) for them, in this way forum would stay clean too and the reporters would get some quick fixes for their issues by the community!

While I understand that not all Bug reports or RFEs can be made public — because they may contain proprietary information or property — a public Bug-tracker for issues that do not require such confidentiality would benefit everybody, including SideFX staff and developers.

Just being able to search for Bugs that are already reported would save so much unnecessary duplication of effort. If a user files a Bug that is already known or reported, it is a complete waste of time for them, which they could have spent filing another Bug or RFE instead. It is also a complete waste of time for the Staff members that have to go through them, comprehend the report, analyze their validity and maybe even test them out — just to conclude that it is a known issue or has already been reported. And then communicate all that back to the sender.

These communications take a lot of time and effort. I have a huge list of Bugs and RFEs, since years, that I haven't elaborated on — not only because of the lack of time (which nobody has), but also because I don't know if it's worth my time to send. Because it might be something already known, being already worked on, or something somebody has already reported.

A public bug-tracker like Github Issues would allow users to help the staff and developers so much more. It would increase meaningful and productive interaction and participation by orders of magnitude.

I also think the Documentation should be made into a Wiki, but that's another RFE for another time.

sans_comic
While I understand that not all Bug reports or RFEs can be made public — because they may contain proprietary information or property — a public Bug-tracker for issues that do not require such confidentiality would benefit everybody, including SideFX staff and developers.

It's easy. Just have a public bug tracker while allowing the users to upload private attachments. Or a big warning popup telling them to censor credential stuff. There are many many public bug trackers online. Blender, VSCode, Jetbrains... even the damned Unity has one! Let this sink for a while.

There are dozens of mature public issue tracker solutions. Look at how they work in action:



User: I have encountered this bug. Screenshot, screenshot. Sensitive info censored.

Dev: Yes and while the symptom is the same, the root problem is the same as another issue so we marked this as duplicate. Here is a workaround posted on another issue.

And everyone can find this via Google. How simple and clean is it? Again, it's a solved problem. Public issue tracker has been solved since Bugzilla days. Which is like, 1999.


But SideFX took forever to add a drag-n-drop image upload to this forum, and the document is the only static site that's not CDN'ed I've seen in the past decade.

So I think it's very safe to assume SideFX doesn't have an in-house web team. We can expect a public bug tracker in 2035?


I really don't know what the mod intends to achieve by aggressively locking threads. Do they want every single person that encountered the same bug to report it individually, so their QA will be flooded by duplicate reports over and over again? I guess the mod is probably from QA team trying to maintain job security. (jk, jk)

As I stated before, the users, generally speaking, don't want to work as unpaid QA for SideFX. They want to get their jobs done. If you have no public forum to discuss issues, they will resort to Discord or their colleagues, making the precious knowledge non-indexable.



As a side note, the forum is also still crazily unorganized. The top section below News is "Houdini Indie and Apprentice". Why does "Indie and Apprentice" its own section at all? And there are "Animation", "Rigging" and "Technical Discussion". So if I have a technical question about procedural animation, where should I post them? All of the three? I guess I'll just post it in Indie and Apprentice because it's at the top and must be very important...

The staff is probably worried (and rightfully so) that the forum will become an endless stream of bug reports. We all like to whine, right?
Look at the list of fixes in the daily builds. If all this were on the forum, it would be the end; it would only be useful for AI bots.

On the other hand, the problem isn't just the bugs, but also the fact that the user doesn't know whether it's a bug or something they're doing wrong. They report a bug, the developers rightfully ignore it, and the user is left confused. Honestly, I can't imagine a good solution. But dragging everything onto the forum is definitely not the best solution.

You may not like this approach, but it doesn't mean the one you suggesting is better.

I don't really see an issue reporting a bug via the proper channel, with a repro if possible.

The team is pretty quick to let you know that it has been either previously reported, or that your repro was able
to be confirmed on their end.

If you've worked in any form of development you know that a public forum based issue tracker is insane to manage.


What examples do you have of a bug not being addressed, or a post discussing it being locked?


L

Not sure why anyone thinks that this needs to be mutually exclusive.

Nobody said anything about removing the current (vastly superior) method of reporting bugs.

The post wasn't describing using the forum as an official channel to submit bugs, but rather not having forum posts locked if they happen to describe a bug or a feature request.

This is a discussion forum. Talking about bugs and feature requests should be allowed in here.

To clarify, what my post was describing was that if a discussion happened to be describing a bug or feature request, then SidFX should report that themselves in the interest of improving Houdini, not just lock the thread and quash the discussion about it.