Sometimes in life, we use things in ways they weren’t intended to be used. Then we become accustomed to that usage and get miffed when we’re told changes are being made to make us use those things in the way they were intended. This appears to have happened with the Jira AKA bug tracker, following an announcement in September.
I’ve used the Jira as a knowledge base in the past, and it was a bloody good one. I’d search for an issue, see something that looked similar to my issue, read the report and sometimes find a solution! Hurrah! Now I can’t do that for new issues, the thing is, the Jira was never advertised as a knowledge base. However it was a useful resource and now it has been nerfed.
I went to the Jira today, and was rather impressed when I was told my time settings didn’t match and quickly unimpressed when I found that I can’t see new issues, search will turn up old ones so there’s some knowledge there still, but that knowledge will become obsolete over time in many cases.
The Jira was never a customer friendly tool, nor was it intended to be. I can understand why Linden Lab may have been frustrated by how it was being used. However it did have a vast amount of information, useful information that could help people to help themselves.
Moving that information to another source would be one hell of a task, so I wouldn’t expect them to do that, but surely allowing people to browse issues, rather than hiding them, would have been a better move. The other issue is help from the community on issues, this helps people to help others. Pointing people to resolutions, helps users to help other users, so when people post an issue in the forum, you link to a Jira resolution.
As I said earlier, the Jira was probably being used in ways it wasn’t intended, but some of those side effects were actually bloody useful, it’s a shame we’ve lost them.
The public viewability of the JIRA is annoying, frustrating and hurtful as you say.
Given that there ARE JIRA which have remained viewable, but simply have their comments turned off, and LL have implemented two special JIRA groups (“Contributors” and “Helpers”) which allow those who have a proven track record of code contributions / JIRA support to be able to continue to access & update JIRA – I have no idea why LL didn’t simply lock-off commentary to all open issues and leave them all viewable.
That way the entire JIRA system could have continued to be a resource and the issue of people using it for debate discussion and name-calling taken care of.
Indeed, being able to view existing issues is a useful resource, finding solutions, workarounds or simply knowing LL are working on it, is helpful.
Closing off comments would still cause a hoo-ha, but they could ride that out, that would have been a better compromise than this new system, that’s for sure.