First off let me say thank you for even considering submitting a bug report. Without bug reports from users it is nearly impossible to know what is wrong with a piece of software and twice as hard to fix it. Unfortunatly, although it looks simple, submitting a good bug report is actually quite difficult and takes some practice. Hopefully this doesn't put you off submitting a report, however, it is worth keeping in mind the fact that most bug reports are actually closed unresolved because they lack the information necessary to fix the problem.

To use your car breaking down as an analogy - when you take it to the garage to be fixed you don't simply say "It's broken" you try and give the garage as much information as possible such as "It's producing blue smoke and making a funny rumbling noise that seems to be coming from the engine". Exactly the same holds when you are submitting a bug report for a piece of software. The difference with software is that whereas it is blindingly obvious when your car is producing blue smoke it is sometimes very hard to tell if a piece of software is doing the electronic equivalent.

If you are eligible to use the bug tracker you will have been sent the URL where you can sign up for an account. Although this system is technically open to the public I am trying to keep it to just a few trusted people at the moment until we have completely tested our change management systems. Once that testing is complete and we are sure we can correctly manage change we will open the system to the general public.

How to Submit a Report

We are interested in any bug from a spelling mistake to a complete site failure although as with all bug reports the more detail you can give me the greater the chance that I can fix it (see a theme here?). With "text" bugs I need a fair amount of context in order to fix the bug in a resonable amount of time. A good bug report for a text issue for instance would contain the information seen below.

Notice that it contains, in the summary, the exact page where the error occurs and then in the actual report it is highly explicit regarding what should be removed and put in its place. In this case the changes were only a couple of spelling mistakes and a word replacement but it is simpler to just quote the sentence or perhaps even the whole paragraph.

A lot of the text on the site will be contained in house details which are the responsibility of the owner of the advert. As such mistakes in that text should not be submitted to the bug tracker. One exception to this is if you see something that is slanderous, libelous, profain or in some other way brings the site into disrepute. Please submit this as a text bug but give it a high priority - perhaps even critical if it is very bad.

If you are going to submit a bug report about a site failure then you need to be able to reproduce it and record the steps required to reprodice it. If the site completely fails (highly unlikely) and you can't get back to it to reproduce it then please report the bug but, sadly, if you can't reproduce it the chance of it getting fixed is small.

One of the nice features of the bug tracker is that it will keep you informed, by email, about the status of any bug reports you submit. You can see what is being done about your bug and if necessary reply to requests for more information. You will typically recieve 3 or 4 short emails per-bug which you can switch off by changing you account settings.

Feature Requests

If you have a feature request please submit it at the but tracker but assign it the "feature" priority. Please try and be clear and concise with a feature request as it is easier to then see exactly what is wanted. General comments, especially praise, are probably best emailed to use in person.