Photo Credit: "Crash" by Flickr member poportis (cc licensed)

While the site has improved in numerous ways since those early days, occasional bugs still do pop up, and a wiki page is not the ideal way to manage bug reports: it does not provide a way to track a problem from the reporting stage, through various attempts to fix the problem, to, finally, a resolution.

And that’s why I’m happy to announce our new Issues website, which members can access to report problems that they encounter as they make use of the Commons. The site is an installation of Redmine, an open-access project management solution that will enable us to keep better track of bugs affecting the site.

Although there are many benefits to using this tool, one downside is that we’ll have to ask our members to go through a quick registration process to create an account on Redmine in order to submit problems. If that poses an insurmountable bother to you, you can always tell us about site bugs by using the Contact Us page or simply by sending us an email. When we receive such communications, we’ll add them to the Issues site ourselves and track our progress as we work on those issues.

While we hope that site members will run into few bugs as they use the Commons, we know that bugs are an unavoidable part of web development. We hope that this new bug-tracking system will help us minimize such problems for our members by allowing us to deal with bugs in an open, transparent, and organized way. We appreciate, in advance, your help in making the CUNY Academic Commons run smoothly.