http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.7/internationalisation.html

Discussion related to (1) independently came up related to the dang group IM problems, so it may be emerging on its own out of necessity; and (2) — yes, more communication on that would be great. Part of the prob is the added overhead of having to mark stuff in internal JIRA AND its public Issue Tracker counterpart, and while I generalize, developers usually want to fix bugs instead of talk about them, so I suspect there's more an opportunity for a blooming role here for community-type Lindens to share visible progress. (I've already been doing this to some extent; again, out of necessity.)

@Laetizia: You make an astute point about the international aspects of this, I'm actually shocked I haven't heard anyone else observe it, but I'm glad you did. (I'm curious what bug-tracking systems may be popular around the world?)

Also, yeah, the flipside to allowing Residents to contribute more to issues is, we've definitely already had cases where people didn't have a clue what they were doing, and reopened issues. Open source pragmatism is lost on people who have no understanding, context, or education — and frustration compounds misuse.

Overlap in these comments points to bigger challenges good to be aware of.

Internally, Callum Linden made "JiraX" — basically, it's a simple Web 2.0-style page which is more user-appealing to file issues with. Internally, we can send some details of an issue by email to be processed by the system, but judging by past junk reports that clogged up Tools menu > Report Bug, esp. when it was under Help menu before that, there might have to be some "good friction". I notice that there've already been a visible number of misfiled issues, so the problem may not be so much "It's too hard to file an issue" as more hand-holding and "Is this what you mean?" context, as you both indicate, Laetizia and Ian. More people setting good examples also gives us a pool of experience to draw from.

These are great ideas! Learning from this will help when I talk with Rob and other JIRA-involved Lindens. Thanks for taking the time to share!

Another problem is the openness of the system. SVC-124 was almost closed by someone who judged all by himself that it was not a LL problem - someone who does not suffer from the problems himself. I can envisage 'battles' in the future where one person keeps upgrading and another keeps downgrading a problem. Not a pretty sight, and it will raise irritation levels to the max.

JIRA, in short, is great for English speakers with computer knowlegde beyond average user levels. I guess that the rest of the SL community could do with an easier complaint system. User friendliness should be the key there. I am thinking of simple, standard questions which can be answered, perhaps in French or German as well. A step-by-step description of the problem can be formed by answering those, giving LL at least a reasonable idea of what's going on.

I see my comments overlap those of Ian for the most part, but I'll add them nonetheless.

But part of the problem isn't Jira: it's that you have two audiences, and are trying to cater to both of them with a single tool. On the one hand, you have the open source community around SL, which needs access to proper bug fixing tools. These guys are technical, and need a tool which works in a technical sense.

Unfortunately, these guys are also a tiny minority of your audience. The majority of the people who will report issues are non-technical users - and for them, Jira is complex, over-engineered, and impenetrable. And launchpad is better, (the Answers tool alone would be massively important for you going forward), but it's not perfect.

So here's what I'd suggest. What you need to create is a front end to Jira which walks someone through reporting an issue, in plain English (and German, and Italian, and French… because 61% of your users are outside the US etc etc). It should start with a single, big button that says "Report a problem". On the next page, it should narrow down what the problem is, by sensible categories that relate to Second Life: Inventory, Teleporting, Building and so on. On the next step, it shows you the top five reported issues within those categories, and asks you if the problem is the same as one of them. If it is, you can select the problem and add any extra details to the bottom (that problem would also get an extra vote on it for importance). If it isn't - and only then - you get to file a full bug report - but again, this needs to be laid out in a step-by-step approach.

Once reported, people who've opted in should have any further info on that bug emailed to them. But you could also do more, if you wanted:

1. When a bug is assigned to someone or they pick it up, they could create ad-hoc testing groups in-world from people who've suffered from that bug to get updates on progress and/or volunteer to test fixes on beta grid, if they're up there.

2. Developers should ALWAYS note their progress on fixing something they've picked up, preferably daily and certainly no less than weekly. If someone's picked up a bug and isn't getting anywhere, they should be open about that. If they can provide any technical details on what they think the problem is, they may get good feedback.

Sorry this comment has ended up so long! But I hope it's helpful.