community powered fault tracking system for Planet

[kucir]

My fellow Geminions,
In short, I talked to Robin from Planet and he stated, that he is overloaded with all communication and it will help him if community can create some fault tracking system.
So I am stepping in to offer coordination of this activity.

My plan is to have ready solution in max 2 weeks. I believe, that we can make it in 1 week.
Lets use one day for gathering all possibilities and then we will see who will participate and which direction we will go.

Philosophy:
It must be as simple as possible. There is no need for some complicated system.
It must help. Save energy and time. Not another system for system.
As it will help Planet, it can also help us as we will have info about which issues are happening.

I see two possibilities:
1) we will write something. (simple database and web interface can do)
2) we will use some software which already exist.

Required features:
- learning time max 30 minutes.
- we must be able to modify which fields will be in problem record.
- system itself or admins must be able to categorize or merge reoccurring problems

how problem record will look like?
- short name of problem
- hardware / software
- priority (cannot use device / can live with it / just a visual problem...)
- description of problem
- problem category

- name of backer/owner
- indiegogo order id
- email
- date and time

- place for additional notes
- log of all operations with problem record

additional features:
- email notification in case of changes with record
- export to some excel sheet
- chance to add photo/video
- standard user can create and later edit his problem record
- community admins can organize records, request missing info from affected users, respond to users in case that some solution/workaround will be discovered, close records which were already explained (e.g. compass not working)
- Planet crew can view records, add notes, make some kind of statistic.

All ideas and help is welcome. I am just trying to speed it up by defining everything from beginning.

What about name of our system? Observatory?

[bogomips]

Good idea, however do not go down the path of building it yourself, that is crazy. We'll end up having to use our bug tracker to track bugs in our bug tracker.
The thing you want it complex, and had been done many times.
https://blog.capterra.com/top-free-bug-tracking-software/
Bugzilla is pretty famous, but you have to install it. It's not hosted.
There are probably other hosted options out there, but expect to pay a small fee.

[speculatrix]

We could create a dedicated fault forum here?

[Pete G.]

We could create a dedicated fault forum here?

I believe the OP was thinking more of a dedicated bug tracking system -- rather different from an open forum, because
 it needs ways of linking bug reports, fixes and so on.

The Haiku project, which I'm also associated with, uses 'Trac' (https://trac.edgewall.org/) for this, and it seems to work well. I think it matches the features suggested by the OP.

[kucir]

The Haiku project, which I'm also associated with, uses 'Trac' (https://trac.edgewall.org/) for this, and it seems to work well. I think it matches the features suggested by the OP.

is it free? do we need webhosting?

[Pete G.]

is it free? do we need webhosting?

It's free (BSD licence), but it will have to be hosted somewhere. To he honest, I don't know much about it -- I just use it. The Haiku site is somewhere in Germany, because several of the original developers are there.

[Varti]

Sorry for the late reply, I have been really busy lately.

Regarding the implementation and hosting of a bug tracking tool on our server, it depends on what exactly does Planet need:

- If they’d like a centralized and easy to be searched database for common issues and their solution found by us, with the possibility for Planet to add comments to it, then I’d be all for it. It would be essentially a better way to handle this thread I’m maintaining: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34797 . There are some limitations for the hosting however, see below
- If they would also like to track all the backers’ issues such as wrong keyboard layouts, defective units or missing shipments, then this would be more like customer support, which would be against the TOS of our hosting provider (all the contents here have to be non-commercial). I believe that it would be better that this is handled by an Planet’s employee instead.

About the hosting limitations I mentioned above: we have a shell and a MySQL account, but no root permissions, so we can’t install packages via apt-get. I have taken a look at the requirements for Bugzilla and it might be possible to install it. Trac seems to provide project management tools too, so I guess it’s overkill for what we’d want to do. Askbot might be also a viable platform (thanks cos- for suggesting it), it’s what Jolla uses for user-submitted bug reports: https://together.jolla.com/questions/

I’ll get in touch with Planet and ask them for a comment.

Varti

[kucir]

I’ll get in touch with Planet and ask them for a comment.

Anz response from Planet?