[Adium-devl] The evils of Trac (was: Re: [Adium-feedback] Fwd: ContactUs - Adium X - Trac)

[Peter Hosey]

(Redirected from feedback thread.)

On Sep 25, 2006, at 22:20:08, Nathan Duran wrote:
> 4. Knowledge of proprietary markup pseudo-language required to  
> format text.

This is the biggest problem our users have. *Every* user fails at  
this. The two biggest examples being failed lists and hugemongous  
globs of crash log in every ticket.

Maybe it's time for an Adium fork of Trac? Or maybe a new support/ 
development system altogether?

Hit list (in no particular order):

- Much better spam protection. Nobody should have to sign up for an  
account or request the bathroom key to be able to file a ticket.

- Saner and simpler markup. Don't do white-space collapsing, and  
don't require white-space before list markers (WTF?). Allow many  
different bullets: •, ⁃, *, -, and any others we can come up with.

- Spray liquid nitrogen into that damned database lock. Then hit with  
a hammer. Sweep up shards.

- Popcorn!

- Abandon InterCapWikiLinks in favor of MediaWiki syntax.  
InterCapWikiLinks just look weird. A user should never see them. They  
also make saying words like QuickTime awkward, since you get a  
redlink for most of them. (Not to mention, MediaWiki also doesn't  
require the aforementioned white-space in front of list items.)

- Require a name (fake or not) and email address to submit tickets.  
State up-front that we will not spam them and we will not show the  
address. Offer UI to unsubscribe from ticket-update emails. Email  
address is taken as a sort of loose password to enable uploading  
files (with some sort of Ajax magic: enter email address, click  
button, upload form magically appears).

- RSS for updates to specific tickets. For example, http:// 
cart.adiumx.com/ticket/eleventybillion?format=atom.

- Support for special mark-up to hide portions from anybody except  
developers. I nominate “{~{~{ … }~}~}”. This wouldn't be  
necessary for email addresses, which can be automatically detected  
and should be hidden for free.

- Also, an editable list in the submit-ticket and comment-on-ticket  
forms for:

   	Words (e.g. $EXAMPLE) you want hidden from non-developers. You  
don't need to list email addresses here; they are always hidden from  
non-developers.

   For us, EXAMPLE would be “specific IM handles and/or ICQ UINs”.

- A feature akin to WordPress' “post slug” for confirmed tickets.  
For example,
   	http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/5585
   could become
   	http://cart.adiumx.com/ticket/aixmlappender-crash

   Users don't come up with good enough descriptions, so these should  
be assigned by developers, and only when a problem is confirmed.  
Random tickets shouldn't be assigned these. The moment of assigning a  
milestone is a good time to also assign a post slug.

   Ticket numbers (e.g. http://cart.adiumx.com/ticket/5585) would  
still work, but would do a temporary redirect to the slug if a slug  
is present. (Not permanent, since the slug can be changed, especially  
if the nature of the bug is revealed to be something different.)

- More flexibility in dealing with keywords. Specifically, drop  
punctuation (‘,’, ‘;’). This should effectively bring across  
to users that punctuation isn't necessary.

- Simplify permissions. The basic level (not logged in) would be able  
to read wiki pages and submit and comment on tickets. Accounts on the  
site would have any of three levels of permissions: admin, developer,  
and editor. The last of these would have write access to the wiki,  
but not be able to edit tickets (only comment on them).
________________________________
\ Peter Hosey / prh at boredzo.org
PGP public key ID: 7AB26BAD (since 2006-01-01)

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