I have come across a lot of serious bugs in version 2.1.53 of Anki for Windows (Anki freezing, sections of text disappearing from the editor that cannot be recovered with ‘undo’, mangled displays of math in the editor, incorrect placement of “” when adding cloze with a hint, etc.). I would like to look through existing bug reports to see if these are already reported but I don’t see an easy way of filtering bug reports. In particular, I want to be able to see only posts that are 1) bug reports, 2) on Windows, 3) that apply to a particular version of Anki, and 4) relate to a particular feature.
Is this possible on the Anki Forums, currently? If it isn’t, can we fix it so we can at least filter by items 1, 2, and 3? Currently, the process to report bugs is needlessly cumbersome and the usability of Anki is suffering as a consequence.
I usually search for relevant keywords like “freezing”, “undo”, “math”, and briefly scan posts published after the date of the release. I also check if the issue is reported on GitHub.
If I don’t find anything this way, I’ll go ahead and report the issue here. Nothing bad will happen if someone had already reported it
Also keep in mind this is a forum, not an issue tracker. It’s purpose is not to provide a database of bugs: github already provides this feature (see @abdo’s link). It’s ok if you want to post bug reports here, and this is aimed to be an “interface” between non-technical users and developers, whereas the issue tracker is more aimed at tech-savvy people.
Besides, there is no “bug reports” category of posts simply because, unless a post belong to one of the few categories for which this does not apply, almost all new threads here are a request for help, because something doesn’t work as a user would have expected. However, among all these, some are bugs, and some are not; but it’s hard for the users who post these to know if it’s a bug or not, as most of them are not acquainted will all Anki’s implementation details, and so most of the time it’s not a bug, but simply a misunderstanding of Anki’s behavior (even though sometimes it is a bug).
Moreover, even when there is a bug, it’s not always an Anki-related bug (other software can lead to issues too).
The GitHub Issues page directs users to this forum for reporting bugs. I’m sufficiently tech-savvy and the issues I’m encountering are very clearly bugs, so in the future, I’ll just short-circuit the forum and go straight to reporting issues on GitHub.
I would recommend against doing that. The goal of this forum is to make users only ask the same question once, by making both that question and the answer public and easily accessible, so that later on people with the same issue can just search it up on this forum, find the answer, and not post it again. So posting here will help future readers.
Besides that, the issue tracker is specifically meant for Anki’s bug. What I mean by that is that when you encounter a bug, unless you are very familiar with Anki’s internals, it’s hard to tell if it’s Anki that’s not working properly, or any other software installed on your computer that is not interacting properly with Anki (and God knows there are a lot of these cases, maybe the most obvious one being misconfigured proxies / VPN that screw up Qt’s webviews). In this case, on the forum users will help you “bisect” the issue between Anki’s responsibility, and other software’s responsibility. Finally, if needed, a dev will open an issue on the issue tracker for you, while forum’s users will help you solve the problems found in other software.
And, finally, it’s probably much more convenient for you to post on this forum, rather than on the issue tracker, as there are way more users on this forum than on the issue tracker, so when you post something you will get some help very quickly, which you may appreciate .
