[AC] Working With Tech Admins

[Guest]

I'm interested in seeing better co-ordination with the Tech Admin team from a number of different perspectives. Since speaking with a number of people, both in and outside the Tech Admin team, there seems to be agreement that this would be beneficial.

 

Firstly, from the perspective of a Tech Admin (and I'm speaking from my imagination at this point). How do people contact you to raise issues? This could be in IRC (ping / .tell / private message), Mumble, forum topic, forum pm, subreddit post and possibly many, many more. I imagine that it must be difficult to keep a track of tasks when there is no "master list" to work from as issues are being raised everywhere and in some cases are not reaching you. Take PvE for example, there is a bug report on there which has an elevated modreq status from February 25th, in addition to approximately 13 other bug reports / issues raised.

 

I'm not interested in pointing fingers at individuals for these issues not being fixed, instead I want to find out how tasks can be better organised for you to handle. It would be great to have a system in which people can view whether their bug report is being looked into and by who because from the perspective of a person who raises a bug and leaves it with a Tech Admin, how do they know it doesn't get forgotten in the long list of priorities?

 

Moving forward to a few suggestions to consider, and I encourage people reading to add their own.

 

1. Problems & Issues forum: Add additional topic tags, even if only in the title to mark [Open], [Resolved] [Claimed:NAME] tags as examples. We would need to encourage bug report modreqs to be created within that forum section to ensure they receive attention.
2. Trello: Having a Trello page for the Tech Admins to work with would be helpful. People's avatars can be dragged onto a task to show they have claimed it, comments can be left and tinyurl's to relevant pages added. If this group is created and is kept private then it would be good to allow for other admins to be able to add tasks to a column so that bug reports / tasks can be requested.
3. SwitchViewz: While I'm not suggesting SwitchViewz is a suggestion, he has one in mind that he's going to take a day or two to look into before posting details in this topic. I do not want to detract from his idea by giving a brief description.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially from our Tech Admins: How can we help to make raising issues easier for you to organise between yourselves?

[c45y]

Give me a big todo list with task assignment please, trello would be my preferred solution. Chinese whispers is not a good way of getting useful bug reports however, and I would like to see more than just admins able to add items.

[schererererer]

Every admin meeting for months we have brought up the necessity of a tech master tasklist, mentioning various solutions from full ticketing systems to a simple google doc, but it has never gotten made. Any tech admin: please go ahead and make such a list so we can all keep track of what has been reported/requested/completed. Anything is better than the nothing we have now.

[Guest Former Staff]

Chinese whispers is not a good way of getting useful bug reports however, and I would like to see more than just admins able to add items.

 

At the very least, I think if we allow users in the Nerd.Nu Staff organisation to edit then all moderators and admins who have been added to that group could add bugs / issues, with the option of adding other users indivudually. For the moment if people outside of staff submit bugs to the forums then I would be happy to update this "master list" to include a brief description of the issue along with a direct link to their post.

[c45y]

https://trello.com/b/nex0BzQt/tech-to-do

 

I've created sub-cards for every group, items can be assigned on a per-item basis

[Guest Former Staff]

https://trello.com/b/nex0BzQt/tech-to-do

 

I've created sub-cards for every group, items can be assigned on a per-item basis

 

Given that Trello page is private (for moderators and admins added to the Nerd.Nu Staff organisation), here is a publicly viewable Trello page (as an example) where any issues reported via modreq / forums are uploaded to the list by anyone on Nerd.Nu Staff, this way the less private tasks can be tracked through to completion by those reporting them.

 

I'll wait for some further feedback before implementing any changes to help oiut.

[Guest Former Staff]

I understand that from previous admin meetings and discussions with Deaygo that the long term plan is to implement a ticket based system into our website / forums so that users can directly submit reports to the tech admin team and have that direct contact back.

 

For now, I'd like to move forward with promoting the publicly-viewable tech issues and tasks trello page with an accompanying post such as:

 

We're working closer with our Tech Admin teams to ensure that there is better co-ordination, specifically in the way that issues are reported from people in the community to the Tech Admins. Previously if someone had an issue to report, there was no central location where these reports were collected and the tech team could be messaged through so many different communication channels that some things may have been forgotten.

 

One of the tools that we are using more frequently is a website called Trello. It can be easily set up and suits our needs for now (I'm not being sponsored by them!) Click here to see our Tech Issues & Tasks page, which is publicly viewable.

 

How does this work?

1. I encourage you to submit bugs / issues either through the /modreq system or the dedicated forum section.
2. Once the report has been submitted by yourself through either of these two channels then all on staff are able to add your issue to the Tech Issues & Tasks page (for staff requiring access to the Trello group, please contact an admin).
3. From this point you'll be able to see the comments made for your report, alongside who assigns themselves to the issue.

• For more sensitive issues to report that require a tech admin, please contact anyone on staff to report the issue. More sensitive issues will be added to a private page, viewable by staff only.

I've not been fond of taking people away from our own website / services to report issues but we see this as a temporary solution for now as anyone in the community can raise issues through channels easily accessible such as in-game or on the forums whereas staff will ensure that reports are submitted to the Tech Issues & Tasks page. We have a long-term goal of a system which is more direct to the tech admins.

 

 

[Deaygo]

I think putting things temporarily into a public trello would work well for now.

[Guest Former Staff]

I just wanted to put a small request here for people to check the tech trello pages more frequently, especially if you've raised an issue / request to ensure that our tech admins don't need to chase people for extra details.

 

There are some issues raised that do not have enough details to follow through with any action and this is adding to the workload of the tech admins assisting on the trello pages. Please, in future, consider the following steps when raising an issue so that we can all reach a resolution quicker:

 

• Can I replicate the issue being raised? - If not, then it may be more difficult for a tech admin to resolve.
• Have I shared enough details? - Where this happened, when this happened and what happened, step-by-step.
• Is my request clear? - Sometimes being too brief with an explanation is as confusing as reading a late-night Barlimore post.

[redwall_hp]

The replication issue is a big one. While there are some things that we can figure out based on prior knowledge or a little bit of research ("oh yeah, that's probably caused by x"), the more obscure issues are problematic: if we can't reproduce what appears to be a crazy random glitch, we can't fix it. (And less information = a lower chance of being able to reproduce it.)

 

For example: the "items despawn too fast" modreq. I've tried several times to see if I can spot an item despawning before the limit, but as far as I can tell, it always despawns right at the 6000 tick mark (5 minutes at 20tps, slightly longer if the server isn't keeping up a steady 20tps). If something like that can't be replicated, it can't really be fixed, since there's not a way to ascertain the issue...which means it pretty much has to be chalked up to "Minecraft is derpy and you got screwed. Better luck next time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

[Guest Former Staff]

I'm still seeing some requests coming through on the cards as lacking information or confusing, some possibly not trying to duplicate an issue.

 

Per Silversunset's suggestion with me, may I request that we have a template trello card to use from C45y / Dumbo or Redwall_hp please? Something that everyone can use to help make the issue and feature requests easier to understand for the tech admins.

 

I was hoping that my previous post would give some guidance to follow but a template may be easier to help us all to make requests easier for you to follow through with.

 

Edit: If you add a template card on your trello boards and link back to them from here, people can copy the template cards when raising their request.