I asked this question in the last developer stream and it was not answered, leading me to believe that maybe there is no plan. There should be.
The Bug Reports > Scenery and Airports section of the main forums has many, many bug reports that haven’t been logged. The ones that do get logged don’t get fixed for years, if ever. I hate to be blunt, but there is a perception in the community that reported bugs simply don’t get done. The community is here to fix that, at least when it comes to airports.
But, if we fix something, there needs to be a process in place to ensure that anything we fix in the World Hub gets closed out in the forums. The Bug Reports section of the forums can’t just be a place where people dump their bug reports and they get ignored until the eventual heat death of the universe. It needs to be a living, breathing space where people trust the data contained inside. Otherwise, why do we have a Bug Reports section if nobody intends to maintain it?
When I fixed airport 7A3, I explicitly called out that I was fixing a bug report in the forums. The first two lines of my World Hub submission:
This submission should close this bug report in the forums:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/7a3-lanett-alabama-no-longer-closed/633710
It was even called out by fellow developer @aurel42de in the comments for that bug report:
Today, that airport was added to production:
| Ident | Airport Name |
|---|---|
| 7A3 | Lanett Mun |
The bug report remains open in the forums.
@CurrentFoil3744 did CYYG a month and a half ago and noted in the CYYG forums bug report that this one should be closed out, as well:
CurrentFoil3744 also did CYSU, which is not only in the forums but is in Azure DevOps (ADO), as well.
Both were added in the last AIRAC cycle:
- CYSU
- CYYG
But their bug reports remain open in the forums.
So either our comments are not being read, or they were read and nobody did anything about them.
Please, do something. I’m a software consultant, and I’ve been taught not to let end users solution your software. So, as an end user, I will give my idea of how I think this should work, but this is only a suggestion. The World Hub team can figure out what works for them, but something does need to be done:
- For starters, give us a text field on the submission page for a URL back to the bug report we are fixing.
- Upon submission, moderators check the forums bug report and the airport submission to see if they agree that the bug is closed. They approve or disapprove the closure of the bug report. If they disapprove, they must leave a comment as to why.
- I assume that the community team gets a spreadsheet or CSV file with all of the World Hub submissions published for that particular AIRAC cycle. Let them also get a list of bug reports that are closed out for that cycle. They can then use that to mark those bugs in the forums resolved.
- Some forums bugs marked #bug-logged have links to the MSFS team’s instance of ADO, AKA the bug tracker. Ideally, as soon as a bug gets approved by a moderator for closure, that bug gets closed out of ADO so that nobody works on it. However, I don’t know what that process would look like. Another possibility would be to have the Community managers close out the bugs when they get the report. This is a less desirable outcome because it could lead to a developer spending time fixing a bug that’s already been fixed in the World Hub.
- In the future, let other members of the World Hub community tag someone else’s submission with a URL, so that if someone submits something without knowing that they’ve closed out a bug in the forums, another World Hub member can identify that the bug was closed.
