Mantis

Heavenly		Post subject: Mantis...What..why? Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:14 pm

I see a lot of people posting thier bugs and issues with veiwers and other things dealing with the grid. That is great, it allows others to the see the what you are experiencing and offer some suggestions and solutions that may be as simple as a setting to a simple work around until our techi people behind the scenes can get to the problem to fix. Keep posting them in the forum, please remember though we do have MANTIS.

What is MANTIS? Why use it? I bet some of you are asking. For those that are familiar with SL it is their equivalant to Jirra. This is where you will post your bugs big and small for the Techi people to see, assign to someone, and fix it. Oh you can even use this to suggest a feature you would like to see in the future. Using MANTIS is very benificial for many reasons. The 1st and biggist reason is that the Techi people do not have to search the forum for the bugs and for the feature requests. It is there in MANTIS and easy to see. Every report is looked at and assigned to someone to work on.

Once you have submitted a report you can follow it, if you know of someone else who is having the same issue as you or wants the same features you can give them the url to your MANTIS report. There they can add and contribute to the symptom of the bug and thier logs too. They can comment why the asked for feature is important to them.

I hear poeple say they (the Techi people) never look at it and not worth the bother to report bugs there. That is not true they do look at is several times a day. What they can not do is always search the forums for all the different bugs. It is great to post them on the forum keep doing that as I said before, next time you do, include the url and the MANTIS assigned ID given to it. This will be so much more helpful for the Techi people by keeping all the requests for bugs to be fixed and feature requests to compiled into one spot for them. Then perhaps they can move along a lot quicker in future knowing that they don't have to always search 1000's of posts daily.

Let's all remember there are few of them and many of us, so be patient with them. There are priorities they have and have do have to place a priority on your bug. As example of a priority..major (in my opinion) crashing of any kind a stopper...feet up the butt a minor, is the feet up your butt when you tp really a game stopper? it is really ruining your idea of fun? it is temporary. Yes please report it, give details of what you were doing when it happened . But please don't make that a priority. Make the game stoppers the ones that keep people from being on the Grid a priority. We all live with annoyances in rl and won't hurt for us to live with some in InWorldz.

Another thing to remember. I know this is said over and over but hardly understood by some. InWorldz is in Beta. What is Beta? Actually InWorldz is in Open Beta meaning everyone and anyone can register account, join the game and be part of the creation of the game. Beta is the testing of a new software, programs, and in this case a game/virtual world. Beta is where the developers hear about the bugs through a system similar to MANTIS and the customers/gamers give their suggestions for features. Once the developers are confindent that they have killed those pesky bugs enough, they then take the software, programs, game/virtual world out of the testing phase (BETA) and release as a completed product. Even then for a Virtual World like InWorldz, Second Life, ets. This will never be a completed project, there are always room for improvements.

It should also be kept in mind that sometime a fix will break something, bound to happen, you can not get around. The Techi poeple can not catch all the breaks that happens, that is why they rely on us the users to help them. The best way to help them is to remember nothing is perfect and your are here to help them improve their product not condemn for their mistakes or not realising that something got broke. They are few can not see everything, we are many. When you do post, do so respectfully, do so knowing they are doing what they can to keep you and 1000's of other customers happy. Don't belittle them, don't compare them to others.

I want to thank the Founders, Elenia, Tranquillity, Legion for InWorldz. I want to the thank Jim and Mcabe and any others unknown to me who are working hard to make InWorldz what is and what it is about to come. THANK YOU!!!!!

You can find MANTIS on the main webpage for InWorldz under Support.