[MC-2302] Lack of proper place to report annoyances in absence of the Wiki

Hello, and sorry, I realize this is not the correct place to be posting this. The problem is, there is no correct place to be posting this - but I still feel it needs to be posted.

The Minecraft Wiki bug report page, though cumbersome in many regards, had an important feature which this new system critically lacks. There is no proper place to report annoyances. Issues in translations or textures are not bugs, and thus there is no place to report them. Issues in game balance, such as those caused by new additions to the game, cannot be properly pointed out to Mojang. And just plain annoying things, such as bat noises, also have no valid category in this system.

I have seen numerous users complain in comments on this system that they don't want to try passing off annoyances as bugs, but are forced to do so anyhow, or otherwise leave them unreported. This system could be great for organizing the workflow of Minecraft development - but the lack of an Annoyance category means actual issues are either left unreported or reported in the wrong format/place - neither of which is particularly helpful to the reporters, the maintainers of this system, or Mojang themselves.

If there is a better place to open this discussion, please direct me to it before you close this issue. Thank you for reading, and I hope we can improve upon this rather promising new system.

Just for the heck of it:
What I expected to happen was:
There would be an Issue Type of "Annoyance", "Improvement", or anything similar.

What actually happened was:
The only Issue Type allowed for Minecraft was "Bug", which is ridiculously restrictive considering our previous system.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Sign in to your account here.
2. Click "Create Issue" button near the top.
3. Choose to report an issue in the project "Minecraft".
4. Try to choose any Issue Type other than "Bug". Observe no such option exists.

Linked issues

is duplicated by 1

MC-2407 Jira Configuration issue Prevents improvement and feature request tags Resolved

Comments 26

Rolf Redford 2012-11-05T06:59:52Z

Yes, we really need need annoyances. In fact, we need "Major bug" too like wiki has. Like, say, crash and/or corruption bug.

Improvements would be nice, but should be separate from this as I don't want to see 100s of "OMG add (overpowering item) PLZ".

Do 2012-11-05T07:53:52Z

> Issues in translations

Mostly can be handled at crowdin.net; if it can't, it's probably a bug.

> textures

Right, they're not bugs; these are subjective aesthetic issues. This is definitely not the place.

> Issues in game balance

If these are severe, just label them as bugs. If they're not severe, they probably don't belong here.

> just plain annoying things, such as bat noises

Again, if it's severe (in this case physically uncomfortable), label it as a bug. If it's not severe, it doesn't belong here.

I don't know if Features/Improvements will be added in the future, but for now we just have Bugs. It's not an omission, it's set up that way intentionally. Enough effort goes into managing duplicate, incomplete, and invalid bug reports already; add an endless stream of feature suggestions and RFEs to that and you're looking at an almost unmanageable situation. We're working on ways to improve things, but at this point I don't think we want to add that functionality (not that it's my decision to make, anyway).

Rolf Redford 2012-11-05T08:00:11Z

Bugs is currently set to unmodded submission, but annoyances and features can be modded submission, not even showing up till you guys approve it?

Do 2012-11-05T08:13:16Z

Rolf, that doesn't really help our situation much... private tickets are actually more of an annoyance since people have no way of seeing that they're duplicating already-reported issues.

Rolf Redford 2012-11-05T08:36:17Z

The features thing is just meh for me. Maybe wiki is functional for that, if setup and all. But annoyance is a must. In fact pretty many of those 'bugs' can be downgraded to annoyances. If annoyances is added, users should be able to use it, and mods should be able to upgrade em to bugs or downgrade from bugs to annoyance as necessary so mods can focus on more critical bugs.

16 more comments

Do 2012-11-05T08:42:10Z

Hmm... can you list a few tickets you'd file as annoyances rather than bugs? It sounds like the kind of thing the "Priority" field should be used for.

Oliver Okum 2012-11-05T15:42:48Z

Do:

id call this an annoyance:
MC-2233
MC-2199
MC-2172
MC-2150
MC-2097

Also, what about creating a seperate page for features/annoanyces (ex: MCF)?
This would hopefully stop the flood of requests on the bugtracker and leave an official place for this.

Alisha J. 2012-11-05T16:12:46Z

I agree, that's a good idea.
Please Mojang, consider our voices 🙂

Simons Mith 2012-11-05T16:52:08Z

I wrote the Classifying Bugs guidelines on the wiki, but a key part of what I said was that one man's bug is another man's annoyance, and in areas of doubt - which are unavoidable - one should defer to the original complainant. Skimming that list, I'd consider most of them legitimate bugs, /especially in those cases where there's nowhere else to report them/. As far as I'm concerned, even a one letter typo in a text label is a bug. Yes, it's not a /coding/ bug, but it's still an error in the game. And fixing errors in the game, of any type whatsoever, ought primarily to be Mojang's responsibility. They can delegate fixing those errors elsewhere if they want to - I think that's a perfectly good idea - but they and this bug tracker should be the central point through which all problems are filtered. And doing anything else is frankly barmy. This is quite a good tracker. We should be taking more advantage of its capabilities, not continuing to Balkanise issue tracking as we are now.

Another borderline bug case; villager and mob AIs doing stupid things like standing in fire, or charging towards sources of damage. Those are both bugs in my view. The AI entities may be doing what they've been coded to do, but if that code is not producing reasonable behaviour there's a problem, and this tracker is the best place to report such issues. I consider marking reports on these issues as invalid 'because that's not technically a coding error therefore it must be a feature request' as really unhelpful.

Do 2012-11-05T18:02:23Z

Simon, I agree with most of what you said. Most of the items in that list are legitimate, and as such haven't been closed. I don't see a problem there.

> As far as I'm concerned, even a one letter typo in a text label is a bug. Yes, it's not a /coding/ bug, but it's still an error in the game.

I'd say it is a coding bug... a coder mistyped it, and a coder will be the one to correct it.

> this bug tracker should be the central point through which all problems are filtered.

All bugs, not all problems. If you have a support request, it belongs on the forums. If you have a feature suggestion, it belongs on the forums. If you want to critique aesthetics, it belongs on the forums.

> Another borderline bug case; villager and mob AIs doing stupid things like standing in fire, or charging towards sources of damage. Those are both bugs in my view.

Then file bug reports, no problem.

> I consider marking reports on these issues as invalid 'because that's not technically a coding error therefore it must be a feature request' as really unhelpful.

Can you link an example or two of where that's happened (in a case where it legitimately wasn't a feature suggestion dressed up as a bug report)? I haven't noticed this being a problem, but maybe I missed it.

I don't think it's anyone's intention to "Balkanise" issue tracking. This issue tracker is meant to serve a specific purpose... tracking software bugs. Its role may be expanded in the future, but for now we're up to our knees in bug reports and the tide keeps rising, and throwing open the floodgates just seems foolish.

WolfieMario 2012-11-05T23:15:22Z

Alright, I suppose that makes sense. But the fact that the wiki had a broader scope, and its issue tracking has been decommissioned, does fragment issue tracking. I'm not too happy about the idea of "take it to the forums" for certain complaints which are not bugs but are issues - I can think of several Annoyances which Mojang staff have addressed on the wiki, which would likely not be considered valid here (e.g. the new food items' inconsistency in appearance were a subjective annoyance, yet Mojang addressed it anyhow). Remember, Mojang staff actually spent a considerable amount of time looking at the wiki's bug page - with its decommissioning, this new system inherits that attention. Anything valid there, but not valid here, has thus lost that chance of being seen by employees of Mojang and thus addressed - it's a lot harder to bring a big issue to Mojang staff attention in a cluttered forum.

At any rate, I hope this will not be too much of a problem for legitimate complaints. Perhaps the guidelines could be clarified to acknowledge that not all valid bugs are programming bugs? If an item texture has stray pixels outside it which clearly do not belong, that isn't a coding issue, but is most certainly a bug (this is just a hypothetical example). I have seen people post "this isn't really a bug, more of an annoyance" around here, although thankfully issues haven't been closed purely on that basis. It does, however, make it feel awkward to report things which aren't considered "true bugs".

Hopefully this tracker, in the future, does expand to accommodate a broader scope of issues without awkward miscategorization. I hope the flood of activity doesn't discourage you guys, and diminishes in the forseeable future (remember, the Mojang guys have been posting links to this place from heavily-trafficked areas such as their Twitters - knowing the internet, the bug-reporting craze will likely wane eventually and level off to somewhere around the rate the wiki previously had). Most of us here understand Mojang can't handle every possible issue in the game - but that doesn't mean all the effort needs to be focused on only the highest priority of issue at all times (this can especially be an unsettling strategy considering those handfuls of minor issues which have very easy fixes).

Anyways, thank you for taking your time to respond.

Do 2012-11-06T02:43:36Z

> Remember, Mojang staff actually spent a considerable amount of time looking at the wiki's bug page - with its decommissioning, this new system inherits that attention. Anything valid there, but not valid here, has thus lost that chance of being seen by employees of Mojang and thus addressed - it's a lot harder to bring a big issue to Mojang staff attention in a cluttered forum.

I'm guessing that this reorganization is designed to improve overall quality by giving more severe issues more attention (and vice versa), and the effect you describe above is more or less what's intended. I don't know, I haven't discussed it in much detail with anyone.

If it helps, think of the whole thing as a "software project," with "software bugs" being any "mistakes" in that project. Nobody meant for players to get headaches, so the bat thing can be considered a mistake; not with code but with a resource that is part of the software project. Similar reasoning can be applied to graphical assets. If there's a graphical glitch and it doesn't look as the designer intended, it's a bug. If you just think it's ugly, it's not a bug. If guys standing around in a fire looks like a mistake to you, report it as a bug... I don't know how it will be received, but at least you can make a case for it.

Anyway, we're probably just beating the horse at this point... it's probably best to let things settle in a bit and see how it goes.

Do 2012-11-06T08:23:57Z

Also please note that the views I'm expressing here don't necessarily reflect the views of Mojang or the other moderators or anyone else in any way, so take all of this with a grain of salt 😉

mike loeven 2012-11-06T21:01:16Z

considering jira was designed to support the functionality of bug tracker and feature request reporting plus the fact that all the other minecraft projects accept feature requests i think this really needs to be handled in jira for convenience and to give users peace of mind that the dev team actually reads them people keep saying post on the forums but with the forums how often do you see a minecraft developer posting or responding to a forum post :??

TnT (Trinitro Toluene) 2012-11-09T15:19:14Z

This is not a bug report. Annoyances, feature requests, and perceived improvements can either be tracked on the wiki or on the forums. This is for bug reports only.

Alisha J. 2012-11-09T15:24:47Z

I don't think You should've closed this; besides, other mods also kind of agree with the person who wrote this, don't they?

TnT (Trinitro Toluene) 2012-11-09T15:32:36Z

No, we've all discussed this and agree. Only the bug tracker moved to this Jira. Feature requests, improvements, etc, have not moved from the wiki/forums.

Selbram (Tory Clement) 2012-11-09T15:35:29Z

We actually had a long discussion about this. Mojang may provide a venue for annoyances and feature requests when they are ready for them here. In the meantime, the wiki and forums are still available for those purposes. Any "annoyance" that negatively impacts the game can possible be considered a bug at our discretion. We are not telling you to stop reporting these sorts of issues, we are just asking that they be reported in the "current" correct place. As of right now, this is only a place for bug reporting.

Disclaimer: I do not speak for Mojang or Mojang staff.

Alisha J. 2012-11-09T15:35:37Z

But it's that annoyances differ from bugs, yet they're still errors/glitches and should have a place to be reported.
Isn't it what we only want? Nothing else.

Jonathan Haas 2012-11-09T15:42:19Z

Errors/Glitches are clearly bugs. Things like "I think bookshelves are too expensive (MC-2417)" are neither errors nor glitches and are annoyances. Yes there are some things in between that are hard to define and yes, this bug tracker could use some more categories than "Minor Bug", but I guess this will be fixed in the future.

Selbram (Tory Clement) 2012-11-09T15:43:11Z

Report them on the wiki or forums. That is the correct place to do it. In the future, Mojang might open the Jira up for that. But that is not happening right now. Again, not telling you not to report them, just report them to the correct place. Unfortunatly, this is not it.

WolfieMario 2012-11-09T17:15:01Z

I'd like to mention that the stripped-down remains of the wiki's bug report pages are meant for archival purposes, and tags for Mojang employees (such as the fixes section) have been removed. The admins themselves have stated that there is no expectation of Mojang employees visiting the pages anymore - hence, reporting things to the wiki isn't much more helpful than posting about them on YouTube. We're told to report things to here, not the wiki.

So we're only really left with the forums, not the forums and the wiki. Just a note to fellow reporters.

EDIT: Actually, as a suggestion to the admins here, perhaps the clarifications you've provided could be posted somewhere more noticeable, such as the tutorial for this JIRA? I.e. let the majority of users know that most non-bug annoyances belong on the forums, and language issues belong at crowdin.net

That's a lot more user-friendly than waiting a week or so and learning your issue was closed and you need to repost it in the correct location.

I suppose, since this is a suggestion, I should post it on the forums? ;p

TnT (Trinitro Toluene) 2012-11-09T18:24:26Z

Feature requests/annoyance reports can seriously hamper the ability to focus the attention of the devs in a coherent place, and thus this Jira instance will be used for reporting bugs only, and not feature requests or annoyances.

In the future this may change.

You may want to ask the Wiki administrators to allow a section on reporting feature requests or annoyances again, but you are right, this is not the place for that suggestion either as it is targeting a separate group of people.

WolfieMario 2012-11-10T22:38:59Z

My last sentence was actually referring to the suggestion targeted at the people here (the one that starts with the "EDIT"). There's no forum for this JIRA, so in the future if I would like to open a discussion regarding this place, where should I do it?

Anyways, thanks for the responses.

mike loeven 2012-11-13T08:24:30Z

and who and how are the moderation teams chosen and what do they use to base their decisions on. are they locking and rendering topics invalid for food logical reasons or are they being influenced by their personal opinions on topics. for example how many mechanics ""work as intended"" but at the same time are undesirable and detrimental to game play mechanics like these need to stop being blown off and ignored and the dev and mod team need to start listening to the myriad of non bug complaints that have been around since 1.5 and STILL haven't been redone or corrected to the satisfaction of the community.

but seriously the mod deems needs to be less trigger happy or allow reporters to reopen topics that may not have been satisfactorily resolved

TnT (Trinitro Toluene) 2012-11-13T17:24:03Z

Sorry Mike, we disagree. You may find certain features undesirable, but others may like those very same features. However, those features are not bugs and will be treated as such - feature requests, which do not belong on this Jira.

We do not disagree that there is a lack of a great place to report annoyances, however, this Jira instance is not the place to report those annoyances at this time.