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

[Evan Schoenberg]

On Sep 26, 2006, at 5:15 PM, Peter Hosey wrote:

>> The point of our using Trac was that filing a ticket was simple,  
>> even  if we ended up forcing user registration.
>
> That's made it non-simple from the user perspective, as we've heard  
> several times in the past week on the feedback list.

To be more precise, every user report I can think of has not said, "I  
don't want to register" but has rather said, "I couldn't figure out  
how to register".  (I'm sure there are some examples, including the  
dude whose email to feedback@ started this thread originally, to the  
contrary, but that hasn't been the general response).

This means several things to me:
1) These users attempted to submit anonymously; only after clicking  
New Ticket did they discover that they needed to register or  
login.    Note that the "new ticket" link was found via the  
ReportingBugs or the RequestingFeatures page, where we've statically  
linked it -- it doesn't appear at all from Trac itself if the user is  
not logged in.  I'm going to correct this right now by saying, "Once  
you have logged in, click New Ticket from the bar of links near the  
top-right of the page."
2) These users then looked for a "Register" link and failed to find one.
3) These users would have been willing to register to file their bug  
had they found a way to do so.

The confusion/problem here is that was intended to be a temporary  
solution -- force anonymous people to log in using the adium/adium  
combination, a completely counterintuitive and nonstandard way of  
handling bug reporting -- has turned into a longer term one.  We need  
the account management plugin.  This adds a Register item at the top  
of the page, where it is easy to see.

I don't care in the slightest about users who can't be bothered to  
register to report a bug.  Our numbers are high enough that we'll  
still hear about bugs, probably multiple times over even with the  
improved signal-to-noise ratio that a single, intuitive step will add.

-Evan

p.s. By far the most important of the problems iterated in this  
thread, in my opinion, is that Trac's built-in search is all but  
useless.  Would it be possible to use a robots.txt or the like to get  
Google to index our tickets and wiki and then leverage google's site  
search?
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