In theory, the theory should be identical to the practice, but in practice, that isn’t usually the case. This maxim holds true for software development as well, which is why RPGpad is still in what we call ‘Open Beta’: to find bugs that we didn’t expect or missed during development.
While bugs are inevitable, nobody really likes them, us least of all, so we want to resolve them as quickly as possible. To be able to do that, it is important to know exactly how a bug occurred so that we can reproduce and resolve it.
If you are filing a bug report (for example by using our new bug reporting form), let me start by saying “Thank you!” — your bug report will help us improve the site and prevent issues in the future.
In most cases, we will need some basic information to reproduce and resolve the bug. The most important is where the bug occurred (i.e. the URL). Often it helps if we know what you were trying to do, what you had expected to happen and what happened instead — especially if the bug isn’t immediately obvious (an error code is pretty clear, but a missing button may not be). Finally, it is often helpful to know what browser you were using — sadly, some browsers treat code differently from others.
Any information you can offer will of course be most welcome, but don’t feel like you cannot report a bug if you do not know all the details. An incomplete bug report might still be figured out, but we can only fix it if we know there is a problem!
Next to fixing bugs and adding a shiny new bug reporting form, we have also been busy with lots of small improvements. One of the more major among them now allows you to link to a specific section of a page by adding the header text to the link: [[Page#The Header]].
For example, you could link directly to the specific part of the grappling rules you are referring to with [[Grapple#Multiple opponents]]. This helps the other players skip large parts of the grapple rules (which we all know are way too long anyway) directly to the part you mention. You can read the details on this new possibility in the help pages.
We have way too many improvements to list them all here, as we’ve been sorting through a whole slew of them this week in preparation for the holidays. Why not check out this week’s changelog? There’s enough there for everyone!