brconflict
I'm ok with the changes, and btw, thanks for asking! I love to see a Welcome of Feedback. The only three things I would like to ask are:


1) Bug Reporting: The Problem Forum should no longer discounted as a great place to turn over rocks and find new bugs. For example, if a user has a problem who (especially in my case) doesn't have access to Support during Business hours can begin a dialogue with others or at least post a potential buggy issue in the forum as a dialogue instead of having to perform rigorous testing to submit an actual bug report. I'd like to see these posts host a Q&A WITH internal CW notation that such an occurrence of the issue has been seen by a user. It doesn't have to be a bug report, but my perception is that with all the reports in the Problem forum, some good reports may go unnoticed. I would challenge the Moderators to acknowledge such reports and decide from there to send the issues on to CW on behalf of a user, or help the user submit a co-operative bug report. If a Moderator knows the bug-reporting tool well, he/she can help the submitting user provide a better report.

If your bug is not reproducable by Cakewalk or others then bottom line it is not a good bug report, in fact it's not even a bug report, it probably won't be fixed ever...

Developers and QA are only interested in reproducible bugs because that makes the best use of their time. There is one exception and that is when there is a lot of noise by lots of users making the issue difficult to ignore. Generally though in those rare scenarios (nowadays) the forums users often find the actual steps to repro or Cakewalk might throw a bone to help with a workaround.

All is not lost however as the forums is an excellent method to troubleshoot issues with the community and there is always Cake technical support, and often that is a good way to help repro actual bugs. The process has to be two way though. When it fails it is when the OP won't provide sufficient feedback.

In regard to helping users write good bug reports, well that has already been happening with considerable success, see the first post here and click on the links..
http://forum.cakewalk.com...aspx?m=3009969&p=1

For some of them a considerable period of troubleshooting was required to get to that stage. Others were more or less able to write steps to repro straight away. Others were found as system config issues (thus not listed)

Cheers...

Anderton
I fix them only in the topic headlines. It just doesn't look good to scan the list of topics and see misstykes. People might think the person doing the post is stoopid insted of understanding English is not they're native language.

I see 'mistakes' as part of the charm of a person.  I wouldn't hold it against them.
 
(and maybe they don't want to be helped across the street)
 

Anderton

Grem
I worry that mods would ruin a good thing here.

I honestly don't think my turning into a sort of de facto mod for the X series forums has had any negative effects. But a lot of typos in thread titles have been fixed, duplicate posts have been removed, I've started/contributed many threads that people have found useful, and been able to provide some feedback directly to Cakewalk. The (very) few incidents that people had were handled by PMs, no one was banned, and the problems basically went away of their own accord. 
 
As I've said before, I think "host" is a more appropriate description of the role. The fact that the community is largely self-policing is what makes this possible.

 
 
 
 
I hope you didn't take my comment/opinion to be directed at you Craig. You do a great service to all of us here. And I most definitely appreciate it, as I am sure many others do.
 
 
 
 

Anderton

InstrEd
My worries Mr. Anderton is that you know how to handle forums. You have been doing it for years and I've seen you in action.

 
Fortunately, it's a learnable skill. If Cakewalk wanted me to provide basic training to the other hosts/mods, I'd be happy to do so (another reason for a private forum).
 

What happens when you are replaced?

 
I don't know if CW has plans to replace me, but the forum runs so smoothly it doesn't require much of my time...I can keep doing what I'm doing if requested.
 
 

That would be a great idea. And one I would support.
 
My concern is that when you place a person in a moderation role, they would no longer be contributors to the forum. (With you being the exception Craig!) And some of the names brought up to be moderators are some of the best contributors to these forums.
 
Never thought of them being "hosts." If that would be their role, it may be workable. And yes there is always room for improvement. I just would not like to see the "balance" that we have here tip in one direction or the other.
 
And just let me add that I appreciate CW's decision to allow us to comment and give our opinions before any changes were made. Great job CW Team!
 

Anderton

paulo
Don't try to fix what isn't broken.

I admit that removing typos, deleting duplicate posts, initiating more threads, and providing another conduit to Cakewalk ("hey Noel, there's a thread you should check out") don't qualify as fixing things that are high-level "broken." But, I do think they qualify as improvements. While I agree it's not good practice to fix things that aren't broken, I do believe there is always room for improvement. 
 
 

No problem with that sort of thing. I was referring to the idea of user/mods having the power to decide whether a post / opinion was suitable or not, which would be a bad idea IMO and also isn't really needed.

CakeAlexS

brconflict
I'm ok with the changes, and btw, thanks for asking! I love to see a Welcome of Feedback. The only three things I would like to ask are:


1) Bug Reporting: The Problem Forum should no longer discounted as a great place to turn over rocks and find new bugs. For example, if a user has a problem who (especially in my case) doesn't have access to Support during Business hours can begin a dialogue with others or at least post a potential buggy issue in the forum as a dialogue instead of having to perform rigorous testing to submit an actual bug report. I'd like to see these posts host a Q&A WITH internal CW notation that such an occurrence of the issue has been seen by a user. It doesn't have to be a bug report, but my perception is that with all the reports in the Problem forum, some good reports may go unnoticed. I would challenge the Moderators to acknowledge such reports and decide from there to send the issues on to CW on behalf of a user, or help the user submit a co-operative bug report. If a Moderator knows the bug-reporting tool well, he/she can help the submitting user provide a better report.

If your bug is not reproducable by Cakewalk or others then bottom line it is not a good bug report, in fact it's not even a bug report, it probably won't be fixed ever...

Developers and QA are only interested in reproducible bugs because that makes the best use of their time. There is one exception and that is when there is a lot of noise by lots of users making the issue difficult to ignore. Generally though in those rare scenarios (nowadays) the forums users often find the actual steps to repro or Cakewalk might throw a bone to help with a workaround.

All is not lost however as the forums is an excellent method to troubleshoot issues with the community and there is always Cake technical support, and often that is a good way to help repro actual bugs. The process has to be two way though. When it fails it is when the OP won't provide sufficient feedback.

In regard to helping users write good bug reports, well that has already been happening with considerable success, see the first post here and click on the links..
http://forum.cakewalk.com...aspx?m=3009969&p=1

For some of them a considerable period of troubleshooting was required to get to that stage. Others were more or less able to write steps to repro straight away. Others were found as system config issues (thus not listed)

Cheers...

 
It may not have been obvious, but I'm not lost on all this. I get it. :) I work in a company that develops software. I've also been a Telecomm tester years ago paid specifically to break products. It's not easy to go into the unknown, but part of my job was to scour through such reports from customers, and, even though I couldn't repro the symptoms reported, I was tasked to really try creative and unorthodox ways to cause the same issue. We dubbed it 'free-style' testing. Not only could I many times find other ways to reproduce the same symptom, but variably, I would uncover more than that. Then, I would submit an internal bug report to the engineers.
 
I've submitted several bug reports that really could have used a reviewer to better ensure the report isn't closed before it's really had its due. I've had one or two that were "assumed" resolved by a suggestion, but the CW person reviewing the bug didn't fully understand the issue from my perspective, and never asked me any questions. Had someone reviewed my submission to fully understand it, or even just ask me to clarify anything in it, the bug could have been fixed. The bug is probably still there. I feel CW is pretty hard-edged about rules and guidelines, maybe because of a slew of erroneous or poorly submitted bug reports and such. Not knowing what their team is really like makes it tougher to interface with CW Dev.
 
But I concede, it's just my opinion. There's still something missing in that whole bug-reporting process. I don't even bother with it anymore.
 
Cakewalk Support have daytime hours, and I'm never working in Sonar during the day, unfortunately. Different day job. :/

Well you could try again in these forums to see if we can find something reproducable but you probably will need to bring your system up to a base standard first, though be warned generally healthy skeptism will set in until people start reproducing an issue. Pretty much all software companies work like this nowadays there just isn't enough time with limited budgets. I'm sure they also have their own test cases to follow which they will run before every release based on regression or other criteria. Cheers.

Thanks for your feedback, thoughts and ideas everybody. We'll follow-up soon with the changes.