We sometimes have bugs that are solved, have a solution, or have an obvious solution that makes it unnecessary to spend time on another temporary fix.
do not be upset if they are closed, or get low priority. Many gui problems for example may be known to not be perfect, but there is just not someone available to redesign the whole gui.
Low priority is a-okay with me. I, as much as anyone could, understand that resources are limited. Also, as a volunteer effort, people will work on what interests them, what they're good at, or what they think needs to be done to make the experience the best for players given the amount of effort they can put into it. Not all issues will be addressed in a timely manner... but it's my philosophy that every issue, no matter how small should be tracked regardless. Sometimes bunches of them can be whacked at the same time if a component has significant change made to it, but until a fix is implemented or the component changes in such a way that the report becomes nonsensical, having the bug report around is a sticky note that someone had an issue with some program behaviour. The second thing that caught me off guard is the implication that if I find an issue in the most currently released version (as a tech-savvy player rather than as part of the testing team using the latest build) and report it, that changes might have been made to the tree already without any record of it being available in the bug tracker for folks like me to be able to say "oh, I guess it's already taken care of" and move on to something else. The DLL thing is a good example, and if the reason given to me as to why it was closed was that it was already fixed for the next release, then I would have been mildly irritated that I'd duplicated effort (this issue on Windows might have been missed if everyone who was installing was an existing player that already had OpenAL installed and therefore wouldn't have noticed it); however, the answer I got is that it wasn't a bug because there was a workaround that was available to someone who searched around a bit. Nowhere did it mention that it was already fixed somewhere, and that's why I requested that it be re-opened.
I am suspecting that given the vast amount of issues that need to be handled, that the development team is just grabbing and running with whatever it can find and getting fixes and features tested and out the door... that there's so much to do that being all "formal" and logging issues in the bug tracker before fixing them would bog the process down way too much right now. If so, then if there was a running Changelog with all changes that were made since the last formal release that got automatically updated on the web when someone checked code in (with their explanation line of what they did), then people could check the BugTracker and the Changelog before logging an issue. Would that be possible to do easily? Also, if someone was planning a big change to something, if they could at least log the big changes in the BugTracker as features, that'd give people an indication that they should ignore those parts of the system until after the changes are made.
Or you first point, is a result of the nice feature that username/password combinations are stored for each server, and will load the last used one when you click the server (and clear them if this is the first time).
Heh, and there's another perfect example... after you've said that, I'd have logged a bug or feature request for a minor change to be made to that code: if it's the first time and there is no username/password for a server that got clicked on, then it wouldn't clear the fields... but that once the values had been registered, clicking on the server name would populate those fields and overwrite what was there before. It's such a small thing, but it's the small things that add up to irritate users over time... and it's something that if it didn't get fixed until just before the game was being targeted for a more widespread release, probably wouldn't bother anyone at all (although some people might whine if it was their pet peeve I guess). If someone had that chunk of code open already, they could just slip a quick fix in along with something else; otherwise, I know there are thousands of things that would be a lot more important than specifically going in to chomp on than something like this.
My point is that I suspect that my involvement at the moment would probably be more of an irritant than a help given what I've said and seen (if you're not all already completely sick of me already...), but that maybe I'd actually be valuable a little further down the road. I suspect that my timing if off for getting involved right now. I can't really dive in deep to the code or testing at the moment because I'm preparing to move and am too busy, but once I know I have some time in a few months, perhaps the time will be right then for the sort of contribution that I could make. I strongly suspect that there'll still be a few things to do then...
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