So the thought just occurred to me, is Uber considering opening up a public bug tracker for people to submit detailed and technical reports on issues they found? Or is this something more for the Beta days? Let us know if you want to hear back on bugs and crash reports. I've worked with CCP's Bug Hunter group for EVE Online and figured this might become a thing.
There will be a new sub forum "technical issue" or something along that line. I forget where it was said earlier.
First step will be for us to simply get a bug submission process in place, which we don't have today. It'll likely come online shortly after the alpha is rolled out to most/all alpha players. As for it being public, that's more difficult. We use JIRA internally, which is licensed on a per-seat basis, so making it publicly visible isn't too hard, but allowing people to directly submit and update is more problematic. Our expectation is that that major bugs will will be discussed in more detail on the forums. The bug system will be for us primarily for data gathering and prioritizing depending on severity and frequency of bugs. That's my guess for now, though a fairly well informed one from past project experience in a more open/connected environment like this.
might be worth concidering uber making a github for PA bugtracking. Valve do that for the linux STEAM client https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux --> https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues Its PURELY for github/git's issue tracking
Would you be willing to accept people which a technical backing and with experience in writing detailed bug reports and reproductions? Also I've had experience with JIRA being a bit more accessible than that, but I guess that was for open source projects.
In last resort, if you don't have any other ideas and are using the forums, create a sub-section specifically for it. Will allow a little tracking and Q&A, and the dedicated community that we are will certainly take care of duplicated and already answered problems with no need for your intervention (wouhou, less work !). Otherwise, the Backers Lounge & General discussion will probably become Hell on Internet (I already feel sorry for moderators, they will have some hard time)... And from experience, i do not recommend a "conventionnal" bug tracking system (way too many people involved). It's already tricky to manage daily a 10 people Indians/Chinese validation team (that are supposed to have some technical knowledge, skill and rigor to use a tool efficiently), so 8000 potential bug tester. Mama Mia ! (remember the questions in the live steams before the use of the Reddit Q&A ? Yeah, that's the level of bugs you'll see). People will usually be too lazy / raged / whatever to use it correctly, and it will need some account creation, somebody to check all issues blablabla... And for God's Sake, DO NOT give visibility of your internal bugs to the masses. Last time a crappy project leader made this (despite my strong objections), i spent weeks to clean the database from useless comments, and write email each time an issue was created (even during internal builds/testing) to the client to prevent a project cataclysm and numerous bad things that are useless to descibe. However, a good idea could be, that after a few days/weeks, you select a "team" of efficient forumer that will gather the forums issues and relay them in your bug tracking tool.
Public open source projects can apply for an unlimited user JIRA license. For closed source projects it runs at about 50$ per user (defined as any user that can log in) per year. So, sticking with JIRA, there's only the option of read-only access to user reported bugs and/or allowing anonymous users to post into a public subsection. I do however like the GitHub suggestion, or if they'd want to stick with the Atlassian product family, BitBucket. Also, reading back up, basically what neumeusis above me said.
