@lightweight and I talked about the idea of adding a new category to this forum, as a clearinghouse for reporting issues with nzoss.nz and iridescent.nz services. Just giving this idea a bump, because I see lots of potential benefits.
At the moment reporting issues with these services mainly happens in backchannels, or in one of the Matrix rooms. Which means for all we know, any time something goes wrong, @lightweight and other admins and mods could be getting flooded with the same messages from multiple directions. All while busy trying to fix it. Having a standard place for reporting issues would avoid this.
Secondly, a certain number of the issues experienced with software and services - even by experienced technologists - turn out to be the classic “user error”. Or they are known issues, which have been reported as much as its worth, and we’re all waiting and hoping for a fix. Or they are novel bugs, or legit features requests, but it’s not clear where to put them in front of the people who might be able to fix them.
In each case, someone in our community may already have the information the issue reporter needs. Having a dedicated space for reporting and discussing issues allows us all to serve as helpdesk for each other. It also liberates us to go into much greater detail about each issue, without flooding realtime chat channels.
Finally, there’s not really much reason for people to login in here at the moment. So people don’t, and there are few posts, and few replies to the few there are. So… there’s not much reason to login. If people were logging in regularly to report outages and bugs, and discuss pain points and features that might address them, the other categories on the forum might get some love by association.
Totally open to other suggestions, but I strongly endorse creating a category on this forum dedicated to reporting issues with the services we host and use.
