November 10, 2021
Should you “bother” to file bug reports at tracker.adobe.com? Yes you should
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November 10, 2021
Should you “bother” to file bug reports at tracker.adobe.com? Yes you should
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I just wanted to offer a quick plug to get folks to please consider filing bugs (and feature requests) at the Adobe site for tracking them, https://tracker.adobe.com. I’ve blogged before about how it can be used for more than most may realize. What I want to share here is that it’s not a “waste of time to bother”.

Some may wonder first, “why is is worth pointing out Tracker? Doesn’t everyone know about it?” The answer to the second question is “no”: many do NOT know about it. But the more important question may be the first, and it’s the real reason I’m writing this post.

Many in the community have asserted in the past (and still do) that filing bugs at the tracker site is “a waste of time”, because they have experienced (or observed) where reported bugs were “ignored” or “not handled well”. Of course that could happen to any one bug. It’s even happened to some of my own! I agree that’s no fun.

Still, it’s worth noting that Adobe incorporates dozens of bug fixes each update, and therefore implements hundreds per year. Clearly they’re not ignoring them all the bug reports.

(That said, I should note that sometimes we’ll see in CF update release notes and bugs fixed lists that a bug id listed  is one that we won’t find via a search in Tracker. These are “private tickets”, either ones that were created by direct interaction with a CF user and the CF support team, or perhaps a security-oriented ticket which was made private for the sake of avoiding release of info to hackers who might exploit it.)

Then again, as for bugs not being “handled well” by Adobe (or not getting votes from others watching them), sometimes the problem is that the bug report is just not written that well: perhaps there’s not enough info for Adobe or others to replicate the problem. Or perhaps what’s being reported is NOT a bug but just a misconfiguration or error caused by some other reason, not the fault of CF itself.

All that said, I don’t deny that the UI/UX of the tracker site is sorely lacking and can be rather annoying to use. that’s a subject for a different post (feel free to write it. Anyone can post a blog entry here.) And again, I do acknowledge that there are circumstances where some bug may NOT be responded to or handled well.

FWIW, I just reviewed the last 10 bug reports (for any CF version), and 8 of the 10 had a response from Adobe. So at least they ARE being looked at, and I think that deserves being recognized by those who regard tracker as a “black hole where bug reports go to die”.

Bottom line: if you don’t bother to write a bug report for an issue you hit, then there’s perhaps NO chance that the issue will be dealt with. We may presume “I’m busy. Surely someone else will hit the problem and take on the effort“, but if we all work that way, many bugs will remain dormant.

As the saying goes: it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

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