About 6 months ago this was being discussed, and never came to fruition. A *lot* of the questions/comments here these days have less and less to do with supporting the system as much as requests to modify it in some fashion.
I think it would be not only wise, but prudent for valve or a secondary party to implement a bug tracker or feature request system that would allow people to effectively petition features/bug fixes assigning a priority to the things that are most important to the guys who run the servers. Obviously, it wouldn't be that bad of an idea to tackle this in the client as well. The advantages for valve would be several-fold - not only would you have a backlog of all the things that your constituents are complaining about, but a petitioning system would allow valve to see priority based on the number of people who are interested in seeing this fixed. Several techniques can be used to minimize inflation of voting for requests, but obviously won't eliminate the problem. The advantages for users would be several-fold as well - instead of clogging up the list with the 400th thread that starts with, "Where is the 64-bit VAC2 support?" One email gets out, and someone replies with a bug number and everyone can see that the bug is marked by valve administrators as "WON'T FIX". Not only is it clear to everyone that the bug is already known, it's clear to everyone that valve has no intention of tackling this problem anytime soon (if at all). Obviously there's a relations issue here - people are undoubtedly going to get bent out of shape when they see something tagged as "WON'T FIX", but in reality that's no different than the current situation. The above-described situation actually lends to clearing up confusion, simply because the lack of responses by staff has, in the past, caused more problems than is really necessary. This simply doesn't work unless Valve and the community participates - if one of them decides that it's not going to work, the whole point is lost. Undoubtedly, Valve has their own internal trackers and a way to ease the transition from moving to the public database to the private one would be a big bonus for them, I imagine. So, I'll offer again - if there is significant interest by Valve and the community, I'm willing to extend as much help as is attainable to make this happen, whether that be writing code, providing ideas, or administering/hosting the service. -- Erik Hollensbe [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
