I've noticed somewhat of a trend in the various IRE communities in which some people will recommend that all their friends/guildmates/(city | commune)mates to IDEA or BUG something en masse to get attention quickly.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the people who read and sort the bugs aren't the people who actually tend to them. But, do these people have some input as to the priority of things? In other words, does mass BUGging actually help push things up, or does it just clog the system? I'd imagine the Divine Algorithmists have a good enough idea of what a high priority bug or idea looks like, without us spamming them. But just out of idle curiousity, does it help? And if repeat BUGging is just stupid, what are the odds that people will actually stop doing it? Or is it one of those things people just talk about, but sane people don't actually do?

Having been an IRE coder before, I can tell you all it does is make more work for those that sort it. We just delete the repeats, unless there is new/better information in it. So in effect, mass buggings will just slow things down. And I personaly, unless it was a REALLY great idea, would toss one out that you spammed in there. But I didn't handle idea's, another did and handed us a list of what he thought was good, we'd go through that and see what was good and doable.

As a prior IRE coder, I would ask that you not mass bug/idea it just makes more work for those that do sort. And to answer your question about how they are sorted, yeah there are general rules about what a high priority looks like and what a low is. High means we need to get to this asap, is could be fatal. Emergency level is FIX NOW, at least that's how it was where I worked and I'm sure it's basicly the same here.

Basically the way bugs work is you have a thousand or so bugs filed. When you have no work to do, you randomly sift through it and fix them, giving more weight to the high priority ones than the low priority ones. Then when they are fixed, do a search to try and find duplicates to delete them. Otherwise, you ignore the bug list when you have other work to do until a god hears of a really nasty one and categorizes it as an emergency. Mass filing of bugs will get you nowhere. Filing more bug reports does not cause anyone to spend more time categorizing them. Rather, it increases the amount of bugs that remain uncategorized and don't get seen since new bug reports then outpace the rate at which they get categorized.

If it's a true emergency, it is best to pass the info on through your guild envoy, who can then post in the envoy news of notify an appropriate god. (Though envoys that spam with too many non-emergency bugs will not be smiled upon...)

The idea of mass bugging/ideaing was to get the admins to see/think that a large portion of the populous wants that idea to take shape. Its usually an idea that not necessary but they think would really enhance thier playing. Kind of like a petition.

the better way to do this would be to actulaly have a petition and send an email with the names of all the people who want that implemented.

This used to seem like an idea that might have some merit, for the reasons Dag and Ralshan mentioned. Since the official IRE forums have caught fire, it doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a deal...just as Elders was eliminated in Achaea, I think the input You All can get from forums and our opinions here on issues that are important bugs *to us* far outstrips any benefit we might have theorized mass bugging would produce.

We do go through and classify bugs and bring emergency bugs to the fore for immediate resolution. However, having enormous amounts of bugs submitted will backfire as it will slow the classifcation process down dramatically as we try to sort through them.

Plus, although Estarra and Roark haven't mentioned it, the vast majority of duplicates get deleted before they ever see them

Would it not be helpful to have some sort of web interface to a bugs database, so that we could submit bugs and avoid duplicates? I realize that a nasty little side effect might be that players will all be able to see what bugs exist in other classes and try to take advantage of them, but it would definitely help speed things up in terms of classifying, adding comments, and prioritizing bugs. When I work on SourceForge projects, I tend to lose bug reports that are simply e-mailed to me, as I like to check the SF site and pick something off my bug list there. Lots easier for me to organize things and for users to submit additional info to help me fix things.