How to report issues

Para una traducción al Español, por favor ir a Como reportar errores Pour une traduction vers le français, merci de vous diriger vers Comment rapporter une erreur

Rules of thumb

This is the portal where us, developers, join forces to develop Chamilo and fix all bugs. It is very important that you report issues properly, as this might greatly improve the speed at which we give you a solution and make the software more stable and reliable.

There are 4 rules to report an issue:

• give us details of your installation: in case it's a server problem, tell us more about your server (operating system, versions of MySQL, PHP, and web server). In case it's an interface problem, tell us about your browser and your operating system. In any case, please give us the version of Chamilo you are using.
• describe how you reproduce the bug. A bug that we cannot reproduce is a bug that we can't fix.
• take screenshots, including your url. The URL that your browser is showing when the bug occurs lets us know much better where the bug occurs, and speeds up detection and fixes. If you do not include the URL in your screenshot, at least write it in the bug report.
• be honest, respectful and patient. Most of us work on Chamilo for free or during our job for specific institutions or companies. If we spend time helping you, it is because we want to make sure Chamilo is a great piece of software. It doesn't mean we will hurry to rescue you because you "have to deliver tomorrow" or because "otherwise you'll use another software". This is why fixing some nasty bugs can take longer than expected. If you are in a hurry, contact one of the Chamilo Official Providers instead.

Extra rule for the impatient:

• don't use the priority setting to give a high priority to your task. Other tasks are probably just as urgent as yours, unless it has to do with security or data being deleted erroneously.

How to use this website

First of all, you will need an account on this website in order to register an issue. This is to avoid SPAM. We don't like SPAM, it makes us loose time that we could be spending improving the platform. Create your account by clicking the "Sign up" button in the top-right corner of this page, then come back for further instructions.

As you are reading this, you will notice that a few tabs are available to you in this project. If you have a new issue to report, please go have a look into the "Issues" tab, and search (using the search box) for terms similar to what you want to report. If the report already exists, then add a comment to the existing report. Do not create a new one if not necessary.

If no similar report exists, then click the "New issue" button in the "Issues" tab. You will be presented with a form, composed of a title and a description. Please fill these in. The tags are not necessary for you to fill. They are there for us developers. Once you have entered a title and a description, add a screenshot or two and save your report. We will see it straight away (the project managers receive e-mails for every new task).

Reporting multiple (related) errors

When reporting a series of problem, please try to connect the issues using the other issues numbers as references, simply using a #{issue id} marker in the description of the new issue. For example:

• Task 123 is the main issue, describing a series of problems in one single tool
• Task 124 is a related or included issue. You then add a comment in the description of task 124 with the #123 marker, and that's it, Github will get it.

It's a little more work to report, but the small number of developers for such a huge project is forcing us to put a little more strain on the reporters, in order to make the work of developers easier. You will see that it all becomes clearer once the task is split into little atomic elements.

The difference is that you will take 30 minutes for the main task + 5 minutes per sub-task (in this case let's say 5 sub-tasks - so 55 minutes in total), while the consequent bug-fixing and communication will at least save a few hours (for example take 30min for each sub-task instead of 5 hours for the whole big bunch). Developers work better if they can focus on one single problem at a time.

This is all benefiting you, the reporter, in the end. You get your bug fixed faster and we can focus on great new features to bring you.

Following up

Once you have registered a new report or updated an existing report, you will automatically receive e-mails letting you know each time the report is modified, so you don't have worry: you'll know when we have resolved the bug.

Code formatting

In order to use code formatting while creating a task/issue you cant click in the "code" (<>) button.