Bugtracker
What is it?!
The AniDB tracker is based on the Mantis Bug Tracking System, and so you can read its full documentation if you have doubts after reading this guide.
The Tracker has its separate user database so not this forum account nor AniDB logging will work on it. We encourage all active users to create an account and submit Bugs Reports and Feature Requests there. It's easier for us and will be better for you (more probability for developers to read your reports/request and remember them after some time). Anyway, if you plan to start long discussions the forum is still better. You can report the issue in the Tracker and link a forum thread in the description (that's the recommended procedure). ;)
How to use it?!
The main purpose for this tracker is to organize the Bug Reports and Feature Requests made on a daily basis and to keep track of their status and evolution. Because of this, all AniDB related projects have a separate tracker project to handle all reports/requests in an organized way. You can switch between them with the combo box in the right top most part of the page. This is the current list of available projects:
AniDB Anime Hint: for all issues related to the hint system.
AniDB IRC (Chii/Lafiel): for all issues related to Chii & Lafiel IRC bots.
AniDB MyList Export: for all issues related to MyList export feature and templates.
AniDB UDP API: for UDP API reports/requests only.
AniDB Website: for all issues regarding the Website design, operation and capabilities.
AniDBoMatic: for AoM client reports/requests only.
Before continuing, please enable cookies for this site (AniDB) as it won't work if you don't.
After sign-up you will receive an e-mail to confirm the registration process. You will be asked to set the account password and right after that be logged into the system. You don't need to login to see the reports/requests but you will have to if you want to input one. You can use Anonymous Login to see the reported issues, but not all data will be shown to anonymous users.
My view
The first page after login is "My View" where you can see a quick overview of all the issues and their status organized by groups. You can click over any of those 'numbered' links (ie. 0000023) to go to the detail page. Clicking over any group header will take you to the full list of issues for that group. You can't do much more here.
Viewing the list of issues
The View issues page has a sorted list of all issues where you can apply filters by any combination of properties and even search over those filtered results. There are a couple of columns that are not that easy to get. First is the one named "P" (for Priority) that stresses issues with a high or a low priority (assigned by the developer). Second is the "#" column that has the number of notes added to the issue. The rating column shows the public rating for that feature with the total number of votes enclosed by "[]". You can sort the page by any of the highlighted columns and the sorting direction will be shown by a graphical arrow in the active column. Take in account that the default list filter doesn't show closed issues. If you want to see them please enable it by changing the Status filter (click over the Status text in the filter box and set Hide Status to none).
Viewing an Issue details
This page will show you all the info related to the report/request, and there are some things to take in account. First, you can add notes to the issue while logged in. This input box allows you to enter HTML code (like <b>, <i>, <u> and <pre> tags for formatting). Second, please don't use this feature to chat with other users. Ask yourself before posting if the input would be useful to the developers. Third, you can also rate the issue so they know if it's welcomed by all the community or just wanted by a single user. And last, you can also monitor the issue, meaning you will receive an e-mail for every update made to it. Just click on the Monitor button and click again to disable that.
Reporting an issue
We would like all people to participate in this interactive community and make reports for all of the available AniDB projects, but please read this before doing so. A bad report is worse than no report at all, but we appreciate your time and we will like to see you helping us. Please, before submitting a report check if it wasn't done before (duplicated reports will be closed as spotted). Take in account that by default closed issues are not shown (check viewing issues).
Category: please choose the proper category. We decided to split categories in two main groups, Bug Report and Feature Request.
Reproducibility: set the reproducibility factor of the issue. For Feature Requests set "N/A".
Severity: set the severity (in your opinion) for the issue. For Feature Requests set "feature".
Summary: try to make a short but clear explanation of the issue. You can then explain it in a longer way in the Description property.
Description: try to be as much detailed as you can. This input box allows you to enter HTML code (like <b>, <i>, <u> and <pre> tags for formatting), so be aware of this when you want to make some things stick out from the rest or keep a formatting (<pre> tag).
Additional Information: any additional information you consider useful for the issue.
View Status: public reports will be seen by everyone, including anonymous login. Private ones will be seen by people with at least reporting rights for the project.
Report Stay: click this to continue reporting more issues.
There is an advanced view for reports/requests but we don't recommend using it as most of the times the additional info is not useful for the developer.
Voting
Developers want to know if a Feature Request is wanted by a big number of users or a Bug Report is striking more than one of them. With this feature they can see the number of users that consider the feature/bug and what kind of consideration they have by a calculated value. The voting facility is in the Details view for each issue and you will be able to vote only if registered and logged in. The possible values are:
- 3 You consider this Feature/Bug quite important and should be done/fixed.
- 2 You consider this interesting to have.
- 1 You're neutral to this. You don't care if it's done or not.
- 0 You think this isn't important to do/fix.
- -1 You think this shouldn't be done/fixed.
Please, try to vote for each new entry as this is the way to give some priority by the user side to things that of course can't be done at the same time by developers. Remember you can change your vote if you change your mind after some discussion or clarifications.
Final commentaries
You can change your data in the page "My Account" and set your account preferences and system language.
The Tracker is a useful tool to help developers organize Bug Reports and Feature Requests. Well used will help reduce times of development and tracking of issues.
Thanks for reading this and we hope you start to contribute.