Problems and feedback with Canny
Whirly Fizzle
All the reasons why Canny is not a suitable bug tracker for Second Life.
I will keep adding to this list as I find more problems
Please, please (literally BEGGING IN ALL CAPS here), can you give us a functional bug tracker for Second Life.
Because we're worth it (hair fling) - might not make sense in the US if you don't have
that
L'Oreal advert lolI suggest we should use Redmine plus a nice selection of Plugins.
Redmine is FREE.
Lots of Redmine plugins are FREE.
You might need to pay for some plugins you need, but they are all relatively cheap.
Redmine is also Open source so you can write your own plugins if needed.
Redmine supports OAuth, so users can login to Redmine using their SL login credentials
Never thought I'd be shilling for Redmine - the poor man's JIRA but bloody hell, at least it's a functional bug tracker, unlike Canny.
In no particular order...
1) MINOR - The pane to type in your bug report details is TINY and as of now there is no way to resize it. It's not usable for long & complicated bug repro steps.
Workaround - file bug then edit issue - edit page is more usable - https://prnt.sc/3SI8knw1xQqK
2) BLOCKER - There appears to be no way to link issues together!
3) BLOCKER - There appears to be no activity stream - how are we supposed to see all the changes that occur in real time - like noticing if someone left a comment on an older issue.
There is no way to sort issues by last updated either.
Canny is not functional for bug repoorts where debugging & conversation needs to occur between users & LL because there is no way for the user to easily see if any of their reports have had updates or a question has been asked.
4) MAJOR - I'm not getting emails when updates are made to an issue I filed or voted on - can't find a setting to enable email notificatations.
This relates to #3 - this makes it very difficult to know when an update has been made to your issue.
The only action that sends an email is an @ mention.
Do you want @mention to be enabled for all users? It could be used to send massive amounts of email spam by griffers.
5) MAJOR - There appears to be no way to find all reports a certain user filed.
This feature in JIRA is used often in bug triage.
6) BLOCKER - You can't attach anything to an issue that isn't a gif/jpg/png/webp
How are we supposed to attach log files, dae files, sound files, animations, gifs etc for bug repros?
7) MAJOR - Search doesn't work well at all. It misses issues it should find and finds issues that have nothing to do with the search term at all.
8) MAJOR - The filed issues do not even have a number reference! They are named with the title! eg https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/first-test-issue
If you edit the issue title, the URL changes!!
If you have 2 issues filed with the same title, it appends -1 etc to the URL
This is a pain in the ass for various reasons - we will end up having test items in inventory named https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/second-fife-sucks-I-keep-crushing-when-wearing-this-avatar-smfh-fix-your-shit-LL rather then just BUG-12345 or SL-12345
This will also look lovely in the release notes with no nice way to link the public facing bug.
9) BLOCKER - No ability to add labels. I use labels extensively
10) BLOCKER - Can't create , save or use filters.
11) MAJOR - Beq can't file any report on Canny using Chrome - https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234806
12) BLOCKER - Closed issues just - disappear!
There's no way to view closed issues, even your own issues that have been closed, they do not show up under own issues.
Only way to find them again if if you kept a note of the URL!
13) BLOCKER - There is no ability to watch an issue.
You can vote on an issue but there is no functionality to even bring up a list of issues you voted on!
14) LOL - Zalgo text will destroy the main bugs list page: https://prnt.sc/yw6HygNbTEbY
Sntax said he's already reported this to Canny
15) MINOR - There's been several complaints now that the text input fields flicker and jump around when entering text.
Nicky & Beq can reproduce this.
I can't repro it.
Edit - Actually I can - https://gyazo.com/2b7788cf457be913969a7f05b65961b1
16) MAJOR - There appears to be no way to restrict issues you file to Triagers & Reporter or Linden & reporter.
Therefore, how should we file repros to crash the viewer or region? These kinds of reports shouldn't be public.
How do we file SEC issues that only Lindens can see?
17) MAJOR - Lots of Adblockers break Canny.
Most people have an adblocker installed these days.
For example, if Privacy Badger is installed - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/privacy-badger/pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp
This issue will display in the web browser like this: https://prnt.sc/Y-P4ucDCl38X
Thanks to Chaser Zaks for this info
18) MAJOR, possibly BLOCKER - It's possible to change your name in Canny.
I changed my name to Whirly Linden - https://prnt.sc/-lmmdanTk4zY
To Reproduce:
* Log out
* Log back in
* Observe - the settings fields are unlocked and can be edited
Your changed name can be seen in comments etc and then the changes you made automatically revert after a few minutes.
Possible blocker - If you can race condition it at just the right time, it'll be updated at the right time and the changes might stick. This should probably be investigated.
Thanks to Chaser Zaks for finding this one.
19) MINOR - It's not possible to get a link to a specific comment on a Canny issue like we can on JIRA.
Log In
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Ok, my two cents regarding Whirly's note...
1) Whirly Fizzle, it's more than clear that, as the major non-Linden highest-ranking member of the late JIRA (in terms of the role you had there), you would
always
be against anything that is simple to use, fast to search/browse, and accessible to all
SL residents. I'm not
questioning your knowledge, abilities, skills, experience, nor even how quickly and efficiently you managed the bugs that were assigned to you (or how quickly you listed a comprehensive
, detailed explanation on how to reproduce a bug, or submitted code to fix it). Rather the contrary — your outstanding work there for so many years should be rewarded, in more ways that one. All that is not under discussion.What
I
question is the overall effectiveness of JIRA to deal with any
issue at all, outside a very, very narrow scope of interests, submitted by a handful of residents who, let's be honest, are not even minimally representative of the SL resident population at large (and never were, even when SL was a tiny environment), but have their own goals and priorities, not aligned to what the majority
of the residents worry about.(The typical example is how much time was wasted with supporting two Animesh attachments on avatars, because, well,
some
residents — who will remain unnamed, of course — could not live without two
fully-animated tails and managed to subvert the priority-tracking mechanism in order to get that
addressed first. It's still used as a common joke around us, when LL claims that something is difficult to implement
and wastes time elsewhere; but I digress...)As such,
if
there is a tool for all residents
to submit their bugs and feature requests in some form that will get dealt with
— instead of remaining for 15+ years around without its existence being even acknowledged — then obviously I'm all for it.In other words — why should we discriminate against anyone who didn't happen to have a JIRA Certified Engineer badge issued by Atlassian after a costly training only available to a few, in order to
successfully
and effectively
participate in the bug tracking and feature request of a platform they use daily?Just for that, I'm all for getting rid of JIRA and using something else.
2) JIRA had more than 200,000 open tickets, filed over 20 years. Almost all of them were
never
seen, much less acknowledged, and only the tiniest fraction of those were responded to. Do I need to say anything else? 3) Claiming that Canny is
not
appropriate for serious
bug tracking is not really understanding the whole purpose of the change. As Signal Linden pointed out, much of the hard work will be done on GitHub and its tools, which are more than adequate for proper bug tracking and overall project management and
automated code integration. Canny will be just a "front-end" for all the heavy-duty work being done in the background. But that's also not much different from the Public JIRA — and its 200,000+ opened tickets — and the Private
JIRA, where the real
work was being done without public knowledge.So... think of Canny as essentially a
user-friendly interface
for managing bug reports from anyone
(not just a small, knowledgeable elite) as well as feature suggestions, allowing LL, in the background, on GitHub, to manage all other aspects of its project management, overall development and ultimate deployment, while keeping Canny sufficiently up-to-date with what's going on, since it's far easier
to manage — from the perspective of Linden Lab moderators — than JIRA.Granted, you
could
do it all on GitHub and forget all about Canny. GitHub's own bug tracking and project management tools are as powerful as JIRA's — without suffering for all of JIRA's nightmares (search works very well
in GitHub!). But, as it was pointed out, GitHub does not easily integrate with external authentication (as JIRA did and Canny does); you can
do that using the Enterprise Edition, but I can imagine that the costs would be prohibitive for managing authentication services for 600,000 monthly active users, of which just the tiniest fraction is willing to spend some time logging on to make bug reports and/or feature requests. I'm assuming, therefore, that this is a purely financial issue — Canny's pricing model is very likely much more attractive, and it does what it needs to do, being easy enough for the majority of SL residents to actually use
it (if they wish).Now, I have never used Canny before, and I'm not exactly a GitHub evangelist — in the sense that I'm not
that
knowledgeable enough about all
the tools and features that GitHub has. I do
like Git as a concept overall (and thoroughly hate, say, Subversion...) and I actually have repositories on the Three Big Ones (GitHub, GitLab, and — dare I admit it? — Atlassian's own Bitbucket...), as well as running my own (mostly for personal/private projects) using the open-source Gogs software (and I'm always tempted to switch to GitTea). This doesn't make me
an expert in all those tools, either. I can
, however, fully agree that GitHub is by far
the best
choice. I have not the slightest inkling on how the actual code submission process works under JIRA, and how it is automated using Git and Bitbucket — which is what I presume that LL has been using until recently. The feeling
I have, from the many public
JIRA's that I've used in the past, is that there is a complete disconnect between the end-users submitting public
contributions (to code or otherwise) and the actual back end where "things happen". After all, even Bitbucket has its own issue tracking mechanism and so forth (and LL uses it as well). I can imagine that it's easy enough to link between both, I just never have had enough permissions to do that.By contrast, on GitHub, where
anyone
can have all permissions on their own projects, all that works flawlessly. You can even have people submitting bug reports, then submit their corrected code, and the system will automatically incorporate the changes and make a new release
(assuming, of course, that the code is really
correct). No need to "wait" for "special approvals" :) The code-checking is something that is run through what GitHub calls "Actions" — there are lots
which are free, and even more that are intended for corporate customers. Obviously, I'm not saying that I expect
that the Second Life Viewer to be run that way — unless there is a special branch/fork for a "bleeding edge viewer" — but I'm just commenting on a choice well made: such an operation would be possible
without much fuss.4)
Change is always hard.
Sometimes it's not a change "to the best". Nevertheless, the willingness of adapting to change is crucial. Even LL, which loves to stick to legacy solutions where everything
has to be compatible with the original code written by Philip, Cory and Andrew (and who knows who else) so that those relics of late 2001/early 2002 are still rezzable and the scripts inside still run and do what they are supposed to do
— well, that's obviously a huge challenge, and one that tends to keep innovation and change stifled down. It takes a much larger effort to break through well-established, corporate shackles that are just tying LL (and SL!) to the past, when current technology is all about the future
. So... I personally welcome change. I might
be proven wrong. Perhaps as I type this comment, work is underway to terminate the "Powered by Canny" experiment, and Linden Lab is toying around with the "next best" thing (even if it means a return to JIRA!). Who knows! But the good news is that, at least, someone at LL is willing to give it a try
. If it works, everybody benefits, especially those who were kept away from JIRA due to its byzantine workflow.5) Last but not least, just the ability to find 20+ limitations on Canny in such a short time just proves the point — Canny
is
easy to assimilate in a short time, and, very quickly, you can learn about everything
it has to offer, and what limitations (serious or otherwise) it has. By contrast, finding 20+ limitations/issues on JIRA is much harder — first, because it requires a considerable (if not formidable!) knowledge of all the functionality that JIRA has or doesn't have. Second, it's hard to know if JIRA is being used to its full potential or not — unless, of course, you're very
familiar with the platform. There are lots of things on JIRA which make no sense — from absurd search queries (no wonder everything gets reported a trillion times) to the inability of consolidating tickets in a single one (as opposed to creating "meta-tickets" which just loosely refer other tickets, and are not easy to change/modify/add to). Is that all by design, i.e. is JIRA supposed
to work that way, or it just happens to be the current
configuration chosen by whoever is managing JIRA? I don't have the slightest idea.By contrast, Canny is immediately intuitive — you can see how it works, and, as a consequence, it's also easy to see its (many) limitations.
----
Ok, so this was a bit more than two cents.
My point is that, at this moment in time, having a JIRA with 200,000+ open tickets (and that's only on the
public
JIRA!) is essentially unmanageable. There are simply not enough people at the 'Lab that can handle all of that — even if it's just screening tickets, one by one, starting from the oldest ones, just to remove what does not apply any longer (and hasn't for decades...). Then there is the whole duplication thingy, which is next-to-impossible to figure out from the public
search. It doesn't help that you cannot re-open or even comment on old tickets/issues, just to bump them up with additional data to show that the issue is still affecting users. So... in theory, one might argue that a Big Cleanup was in order, one way or the other, because the JIRA was not
manageable any longer.And note that this
in spite of its terrible, user-unfriendly interface
, which turns residents away with legitimate issues to file. How many opened tickets would there be if it were easy
to file them on JIRA?Last but not least, and for the sake of completeness — the way JIRA has been configured has also changed over the years. At some stage, we even had a "feature request" area; or different areas for different projects. This, unfortunately, was turned off, in favour of a single queue for everything — feature requests, bugs, issues, complaints. I understand that this makes it easier to triage — there is only
one
queue to look at. But it also means that prioritizing what to deal with first is much harder, when you have all kinds of requests dumped in the same queue.Again... and
that
with a terrible user interface, which every sane person would avoid like the plague. Imagine if it were easier to file JIRA tickets! There would be 2 or 20 million
open tickets... without any of them ever having the slightest hope of getting addressed...— Slightly edited to deal with some Markdown quirks...
Dan Linden
open
Dan Linden
closed
Prokofy Neva
Bug reporting and feature requests need to be in separate systems. This feedback system is in fact very good so far for feature requests and discussions and Linden response, much like the old Feature Request system in SL was, which represented a rough form of democracy (and which was killed off by only one "optimizer" with the consent of only one Linden). If a feature requested is accepted, then it moves on a pipeline to a separate system for bug requests and feature
processing
. Would that make sense? The Canny system is informal and has an easy user interface and commenting which are all great for the non-tech user. The tech user will want something more stringent and that could be in another separate but related system.Polymath Snuggler
Also I can't see who the voters are ~ it's just "+ more". On JIRA I could see~
That was tremendously useful if I saw certain Lindens were following it, I wouldn't need to worry about getting it seen.
Polymath Snuggler
Something to add to this list if you haven't already added it ~
Users can delete their posts!
There's this Delete Button. I'm not sure what happens ~ if the original poster clicks delete does the whole "JIRA" Evaporate?? Kapoof?
It seems to?? At least on the front end it does.
^ This is a ticket I made. It doesn't exist anymore.... apparently.
It's gone!~ ::waves at it tearfully::
Edit : Ah ha! Posts with comments can no longer be deleted, but comments can be deleted, and then the post can be deleted.
Edit Edit : Edited posts don't show as being edited, nor does their time refresh.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Polymath Snuggler is that
really
a problem?... So long as LL keeps backups of older versions of posts/comments, for historic purposes, I cannot see any problem with that.Now, if
residents
can delete posts/comments from other
residents.... then I might have something to say about it... especially if it's deleting without a trace, unlike what happens on a Wiki (where you can
delete whatever you want, except
the log of the deletions you made :) )Kadah Coba
"Something went wrong, try again later"
ie. Post/comment was actually recorded, but the frontend goofed up and now there's dupes.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Kadah Coba delete the dupes. Easy! See Polymath Snuggler's comment above.
primerib1 Resident
Alternative to Redmine:
V
VriSeriphim Resident
Sure, Canny is easy to use, but it lacks a lot of features that forums have, as well as lacking many features of an issue tracker.
It's too easy to lose track of posts. Even if you bookmark your own posts and any you want to watch, the fact that changing the title changes the URL breaks that.
Issue numbers are a lot more useful than some people seem to think.
And, as mentioned, search is broken badly.
So, I am inclined to agree with the assessment that Canny is a blackhole.
Vincent Nacon
I don't really hate Canny, but I can see how it's missing some functionality. I also can see how LL is hoping Canny will update over time and be able to provide us what we need. JIRA was dreadful to use, to be honest. I'd just sit back and wait. 🤷♂️
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