Submitting a bug report

Wiki ▸ Submitting a bug report

First off, we're sorry you're here. We try to perform as many user tests as possible, but occasionally bugs do squeak through. It's not your fault. You did not create the bug. You did not break the system. You are not stupid.

There exists a bug, the system broke. Now lets find it and fix it. It’s not about you, it's about the bug.

That said, please be sure that you've read through the rest of the wiki to ensure that your issue is actually a bug and not a usage confusion. You can also ask us questions in our project chat room or post your question to the user support forum. If we determine your issue there is actually a bug, we can help you with filing it.

Why send bug reports?

Bug reports help us developers in many ways:

• They tell us about issues we are not aware of.
• They help identify new features that we may not have thought of.
• They help us get a feel as to how the software is used, so we can make it better.

Without bug reports, we have no idea things are going wrong, or acting slowly or not working for you. We need these just as much as you need the software to sing and dance.

Sample bug reporting template

Bug reports that do not conform to the standard below may be linked to this page. We may not help you until you provide all the info below. We aren't trying to be mean; sometimes we simply cannot determine the cause of your issue if we have insufficient information from you about it.

You can copy and paste our issue template to make sure your report includes all the information we need.

Checklist for your ticket

There are a couple of important things you should know before creating a new issue ticket. Use this list to make sure your ticket has all the information we need, especially if you're not using the issue template linked above!

Does your report include…

• Operating system/platform in use?
• Web browser make, model, and version number?
• Web address (URL) where the issue presents itself?
• Whether or not the issue is reproducible? (I.e., is it a one-off bug or does it happen every time?)
  • Some of the most annoying bugs are intermittent and cannot be reproduced. We’d like to know up-front if we are dealing with an oddity or an every-time bug.
• Specific steps to reproduce the bug?
  • If you can make this bug happen again, great. That’s a huge help. Describe step-by-step how to reproduce it, from as far back in the process as possible. This means you should write out the steps you took before the problem presented itself; most good bug reports have at least three or four steps, not just one or two. And again, be specific at each step. “I clicked on X” is different to “I double-clicked on X” is different to “I tabbed to X and pressed return.” All three trigger X, but what did you do?
• A description of the results you expected?
  • Describe what you expected to happen when the bug occurred. This section is especially useful if the program does not behave as you expect it to, or if you would like to change the way the program works because it’s annoying.
• A description of what actually happened?
  • What did happen when the bug occurred. What was wrong, why is it wrong, or if an error was thrown, what was the error? (Don't paraphrase errors yourself, copy and paste them so we can read them verbatim ourselves.)
• Instructions for working around the bug (if you found a workaround)?
  • If you have found a way to continue using the software by working around the bug, explain it. We may fix the bug, but the workaround could be causing other problems.

Please remember that we may not help you until you provide all the info above. If there's something in this checklist that you can't find out or don't know, then explicitly write "I don't know" rather than leaving that part of your bug report blank or omitting it entirely.

Before you submit your report

Before you submit a new issue ticket in our issue tracker, please read the following guidelines.

• Search before you post! (No duplicates, please.)
  Please use the search function to search for similar issues. If you find something that resembles your issue, comment on that ticket and discuss your experience there. This keeps our issue tracker organized and helps us fix bugs more reliably and more quickly.
• One bug report per ticket! (No separate bugs in a single ticket!)
  Please create separate issue tickets for separate issues. Combining different bugs into one ticket forces our volunteers to do unnecessary work to understand and re-categorize your issue, which slows us down and ensures your bug won't get addressed as quickly as it could be.
• Don't add tags in the issue title! (No plaintext metadata in titles!)
  Please do not try to add tags like "[Bug]" or "Issue:" in your issue ticket's title. We read each and every single ticket and label them ourselves accordingly. Use the ticket title to describe what your ticket is about in as few words as you can. By being succinct and clear, you can help us triage your issue to the appropriate queue as quickly as possible.

We do want to hear from you. Seriously we do. We want you to send bug reports in, we need you to bother us, and we know how hard it is for you to produce a bug report. A lot of people don’t report bugs because they do not want to bother the developer. That is the wrong attitude. Send us your bug reports and ideas. Barrage us with them if you can.

Submitting your bug report

Submit bug reports here.