A better alternative?

[Mike Vandine]

 Posted by:  Mike Vandine 

Hi all,

Unify has another alternative to the Bug Report newsgroup. In the Unify
support section of our webpage, we have a whole set of support forums,
including one for bug reporting. You might try that forum instead of this
newsgroup. Here's the address:

https://support.guptatechnologies.com/supportforum/

Best regards,

Mike

[Igor Ivanovic]

Mike,

It's always a painful process when switching to something new.

We have all used the newsgroup for years now, and get used to it, when
looking for help or for posting of found bugs, defects or similar.

I found it a bit confusing checking the newsgroup as well as the forum
for new posting.

Although I prefer the newsgroup, and the ability to download the posts
and read them offline, not to mention the tree like structure which I
get with my newsreader instead of the flat look of the phpBB forum
(BTW there are forums that let you choose the look: tree or flat) I
understand that you guys prefer the forum at least for the bug
reports.

So, something has to be done in order to prevent confusion.
I don't know, maybe you should post an info and close
forum.gupta.bugreport for posting so we shall all start to use the
forum for bug reports or vice versa.

What does the community think about the problem?

Igor

[James McCall]

 Posted by:  James McCall 

I doubt you'll get a definitive answer to this - we have already read plenty
of pros and cons for both systems. Making one of them read-only obviously
makes sense though.

MAYBE the Unify people would be more responsive in the web forum, as well as
being more hands-on as moderators removing irrelevant posts (for example
deleting non-source code posts from the source code forum, if it was to move
there).

In the mean time, for bug reports at least, I'll use whichever method is
most likely to get a response from Unify! ... so if a Unify person is
telling us about the web forum then that's where I'll be posting in the
future.

James

[James McCall]

 Posted by:  James McCall 

Having said that Unify might be more responsive in the web forum I note that
Mike Vandine has made a hurculean effort to acknowledge this newsgroup's
TD5.1 posts. Knowing that these things are at least being recorded and
(hopefully) prioritised is very useful and much appreciated, thanks Mike.

[Mirko]

Hi Igor,

I wouldn't mind, as you suggested, if the newsgroup bugreport was closed
(maybe set read only) so that bugs would be logged on the forum only !

On the other hand closing all forums of this newsgroup would be IMO a very
bad idea.

Newsgroups are much better when sharing files and reading offline.

We were always told this was OUR newsgroup and that it was only hosted by
GUPTA.

Mirko

[Martin Duty]

 Posted by:  Martin Duty 

I prefer to have the Newsgroup instead of a web forum for searching out
problems, and work around to bugs.

Web forums just always seem a big pain to searching for specific wording and
such, IMO.

Web forums get hacked and data can get lost. While I'm sure a News server
could also get hacked, I feel it is less likely. phpBBs, has had security
issues.

Having the full postings on the News group from over 10 years on my laptop
is a plus. Not everywhere I work can I get access to the internet to go
search through a web forum.

For reporting Bugs, I don't have a problem with needing to go to a web forum
or a log posting application or such. But for community support please keep
the news group and drop the web based forum.

just my 1.999999 cents.

Martin

[Mike Vandine]

 Posted by:  Mike Vandine 

Thanks for the kind words, James. I wasn't the one doing all the defect
creations. I just am matching the defects created to the entries posted
here.

I didn't mean to put anyone in a panic about the newsgroups. My suggestion
was only for the bugreport forum and that was really for our ease of getting
what's been reported directly to the Engineers. Right now there are several
methods for people reporting defects and we have to check all the reports in
all places and try to correlate what's already been reported, looked at,
reproduced and which have had defects already logged. A bit of a nightmare
at the moment. One source of bug input would make our job a lot
easier.

It was our intention to reproduce every problem reported with 5.1 (where
possible) and create defects for them so Engineering could get them fixed.
I believe that we've done so; I am going to do a final whip-through today to
see if I've missed responding to anyone.

BTW, if we couldn't reproduce it, we wouldn't have logged a defect, so if
you don't see a response to a defect you've reported, you might want to
contact me directly with a *small* test case that we can use to show the
problem. If you respond to me from this newgroup posting, make sure you
take off the 'nospam' from the email address.

Best regards,

Mike