What's the timeline for fixing Wayfarer's growing list of bugs?
tehstone-ING
Posts: 932 Ambassador
When can we expect the Wayfarer team to do a "bug bash" type of event to clear up some of the long standing issues that Wayfinders have reported? This is a common practice for development teams to catch up on bug fixes without taking so much time away from the regular development process and the Wayfarer experience could certainly benefit from it.
Here's a recap of the current bugs the community is tracking:
- "jump to streetview" bug
- nearby "check for duplicates" often does not fully populate, misses some number of nearby wayspots
- the issue that causes severe page slowdowns when reviewing in Firefox
- Reviewers will not receive edit reviews from their selected Home and Bonus locations despite a help page indicating they will
- the missing items in the "what is it selector": basically everything under the garden subcategory (possibly others?)
- nominations currently in voting can not be selected for "upgrade next"
- nominations in voting cannot be withdrawn
- language filter has a lot of "false positives" as well as actually inappropriate words that are allowed, also has issues with non-english words
- the Wayfarer access test does not work in (some/all?) non-English languages
- emails for edits reference a contributions list that doesn't exist
- deleting a game account breaks all access to wayfarer
- rejections from Niantic review have no rejection reasons
- more than 2 rejection reasons per nomination, 2 displayed at random on each page refresh
- support chat clears at times with no way to see the result or history of tickets
- "what is it" prompt indicates just 1 item should be chosen but ideally all applicable items should be selected
- sometimes upgrades get completely stuck. (the norm for upgrades in the US is 2-4 hours in voting but some will languish for weeks)
- When a player drops to 0 available nominations in Ingress or Pokemon Go, occasionally they will not receive 1 on the first day (possibly not a wayfarer issue but affects both games)
Comments
While I would love to see these bugs fixed, I do not plan to upvote this question, as at this point I'm convinced it will be a wasted question slot with a vague "we're working on it" answer and no action.
This comment could be adjusted to literally every question in here, every time we do these.
Fair enough. Upvoting so at least someone hears it's still a concern, I guess.
I also want to add a question about this relating to Niantic's internal bug handling process and turnaround times to problem solving.
When a bug report is raised, where does it go and what happens to it? in a typical IT environment, when a problem is raised, it gets assigned a priority, anywhere from low not really a priority to high urgent fix it now priority and each stage has its own "when can we expect this to be resolved" question.
When a Wayfarer bug has existed for 6 months+, clearly its not a priority, or in typical Niantic fashion, they need active staff/developers to fix the problem... oh wait they fired them all, and then nothing gets done, so then they need more staff to replace the staff they already previously had... why fire people to replace them later down the line? surely a setback is a very clear oversight.
This is a really good list, you got my full suport.
they don't really answer any of the questions anyway so I don't see the issue with this or even some of the "questions" which aren't really questions but statements of the community's discontent slipping through.
EVERY email that Niantic sends has something wrong with it. Many are outright untruths, a few are merely astoundingly confusing.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/37308/all-17-wayfarer-emails-are-wrong-and-or-misleading#latest
Niantic probably reads the bugs, then puts their interpretation of ones they consider actual bugs into an internal system, where it's pioritized. There is no communication, so Explorers (volunteers) feel ignored and get frustrated. The company's reputation is negatively impacted.
What if: someone from Niantic goes through https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/categories/report-a-bug once a week (at this point, we'd be happy with biweekly) and replies something like "Working as expected" to "Moved to Niantic bug list" to "Slated for the next sprint, approximately a month from today" to "should be fixed in the next release" and finally "Fixed!"