Unity Bug Report Requirements

The requirements in the bug report system when Unity crashes is too much.

How many words do you need exactly for the description? The amount of times I've cancelled these because I couldn't think of anymore words to put in and/or I couldn't be bothered copying and pasting a block of text until it fulfilled the requirements.
Unity must get a lot less bug reports because of this, -nobody- in my last place reported bugs in two years because of this - they couldn't justify the description length.

 

My descriptions are always far shorter than that
Either it's somehow detected you've just spammed the same stuff over and over, or something else has gone wrong

I've submitted reports that are just 3-4 lines before

 

It probably just gives the message about description length whenever there is a problem with the description. If you just spam garbage like that into the description, you're just wasting your time anyways. You should expect your bug report to be closed immediately as soon as someone on the QA opens it, no matter if there really is a real issue hidden within all the trash you're including.

 

Is there a reason why you haven't just filled out the bug report properly?

 

So you're lazy AF and you open a forum thread about it and write more words about this than you wrote about your actual problem in the bug report? Well. Lol?

 

I didn't say that. I consistantly fill out bug reports with a S*** load of blank text. I just don't have enough dialogue when the event was 'I opened the animation controller and Unity crashed'.
How would you expand on that exactly, Dickins? Please respond.

 

What actions had you performed prior to opening the animation controller? Were you creating a new controller? Were you opening an existing one? Is there anything unusual about the controller? It's not that hard to come up with additional info about the situation. Unity will decide what is important about it when they file away.

 

You're joking right? Was there nothing you did leading up to the issue?

1) I opened project "My silly project"
2) I made changes to the lighting in scene "my silly scene" and saved the scene
3) I closed that scene and opened scene "my second silly scene"
4) I clicked on scene GameObject "my silly GameObject"
5) I clicked on its Animation Controller in the inspector

 

I'm echoing everyone in my office - reduce the amount of words you need to enter before submitting, it's simple, you'll get more bug reports back.

No offence intended, and I know -everyone- should enter all the information needed, but we're not all as patient as you lot. Thanks.

 

If that's the attitude you have then why are you submitting a bug report at all? Because to be blunt a bug report with little to no useful information is basically worthless. I know whenever I'm in a hurry, feeling lazy, or can't remember enough of the steps I had performed I just close the bug report and continue where I left off.

 

I mean the OP is not super tactful but there is an issue here:

What should I do if I get semi regular but seemingly random crashes?

Unity crashes multiple times per day when I'm editing animations. It's not the same animation, it doesn't even have to be the same project. It has been happening for many months, I do not know why it happens other than I'm editing an animation and then sometimes Unity crashes.

Are the logs that Unity captures useless if I cannot provide too much context? Should I be sending those bug reports if I have nothing to say? Aren't these kinds of bugs worth investigating? What is the point of the bug reporter popping up when Unity crashes if they're not?

 

Ryiah, you would rather send nothing than a small description in a bug report? How is that helping?

AcidArrow said it better than I did.

In my opinion, it really needs to have the amount of characters entered reduced.
I'm guessing most who posted here are obviously very eloquent in their bug reports, but I wonder if the reports sent back are a few words and the rest are just keyboard mashing?

 

Your bug report does contain nothing though.

 

Is there?



This is 5 short lines, and I removed most of the files Unity wants by default, and I can now send a report with a strength of 4/5.

I just deleted 2 and a bit of my lines and it will still let me send the report - with a lower strength. By a quick count, if it's word count that matters then they're only after 24 words, which isn't much at all.

If I remove my own text and replace it with copy-pastes of the form's original content it won't let me send at all, even though it's much longer. My conclusion is that the issue isn't with the number of characters, it's that Unity are deliberately filtering out entries with junk text.

Those logs contain reams and reams of data. They can't read it all. Even if they could, if they don't know what went wrong they could easily miss important info in there. They need some context to know where to look and what they're looking for.

A staff member has said in the past that crash reports are still useful if you have no extra info to add, as they can help narrow down things like problematic software/hardware configurations that they can then investigate further. Aside from that, @Joe-Censored's answer nails it - some dot points of "I was doing X and then Y happened" is likely to already help them cull down the set of data they need to look at.

 

Does anyone know if they have reduced the amount of characters needed in a more recent version?

 

"A more recent version" than what?

Anecdotally, no. I've been sending bug reports since Unity 2, and at no point in any of that time have I run into issues with the length of reports, which have always been in the ballpark length of my example above.

Can you give an real example of a bug report that you've tried to make which was too short? The issue in your example is not the length, it's that your content is jsut copy-pastes of the form's original content.

 

I believe he says when it's crashing the requirements are different.

(emphasis mine).

And also my general point/question still stands. Every time I have sent crash reports where I was unable to provide much context other than the logs, the bug was just closed. Which begs the question, why does the bug reporter pop up after a crash?

But otherwise yeah, only a few lines are needed.

 

One thing to note is that the "Report strength" bar does not update until you click on a different part of the form. Is the issue perhaps that you're hoping for it to update as you're typing, and that simply never happens?

 

Nah, as I said, the couple of times I did this, the bug was just close because they could not replicate it (?) I wrote what I was doing and that it was a semi-random semi-repeatable crash.

These days I auto close the bug reporter and just scream a little every time Unity randomly crashes.

 

I changed mine to "crash bug" and it'll still let me send a much shorter, junkier message than my earlier example.

After messing with this for a few minutes I've got a pretty good idea of exactly what the requirements are. Seems like the only thing that info is good for is providing junk reports, though, so I don't feel inclined to share.

This is the problem. Stop worrying about character counts, and start describing the thing that happened before the crash. 3 sentences will do it.

 

No. I'm saying if I can't be bothered to create a quality bug report then I would rather not send anything at all. If a very short description is legitimately all that applies to the situation that's a different story, but what you're showing in your example in your original post is most definitely not a good bug report.

 

Closed reports are likely still kept in their database, and can provide additional data when related issues are being investigated. For subtle or rare bugs it could be that no single report provides all the data that is needed.

Example: A game is crashing on PC. From the first bug report all I know is that a random person's arbitrary computer crashed while playing my game. At this point I don't even know if the issue is within the game at all. Some more crash reports come in. Eventually, I notice that a number of those reports include, maybe, the same video card and driver version. Now I know what to investigate, and I could not have known that without numerous bug reports.

 

Fair point. I don't know. His first image shows something different, but maybe it detects the repeating text? (although I think that's too advanced for the bug reporter)

Personally, I never send crash bug reports any more and just hope the crashes go away, somehow.

 

:-(

(I was too slow at editing an example into my last post, by the way.)

 

I was too late in editing my last post too!

 

I just tried it with the latest stable release I have installed and it didn't care in the slightest. I tried it with Unity 5.6.7 too and that didn't even say anything about the length of the description but it didn't fill in the bars with color either.

Spoiler: Unity 2019.2.0

 

The image attached in the 1st post shows many more lines though.

So the question is: Is something wrong with the OPs bug reporter? Are the requirements different when Unity actually crashes?

 

The image attached in the OP shows the text box's original contents copy-pasted many times. I specifically tested that case, and it specifically didn't work. It's a case that is being deliberately filtered out.

Maybe, but the only cases we're aware of is the one in the OP, and "a S*** load of blank text".

 

This. With a few minutes of data analysis, a hundred short reports can actually yield useful data. Given how easy it is to do bulk data handling these days, everyone should be asking for and submitting 'trivial' reports.

 

So small update to this, when the bug reporter actually pops up after an actual crash it seems to have different requirements for report strength. Not sure if it's intended or if it's a bug.