Forcing People to Use Topic Template to Debug the Issue Faster

Hi @Ryan,
Since you are the admin for this beautiful forum, the suggestion is to make your life easier. I am pretty sure you already know about Stackoverflow. Best & worst friend of a developer. When you create a new topic there, you have to follow a specific template. Maybe we could use something like this in this forum as well. Basically, we could get more information from user before they create the topic.

Creating a default template for a topic would help everyone. For example, a template could ask for specific information from the user such as server, time, operating system, phBot version, uploading bot config etc. This way, we all can skip the step for asking those information from the user. Because some bugs are related with server itself for example. Some of them might be related with operating system or phBot version. Sometimes we might need to see the configuration.

Let me share an example screenshot:

Doesn’t have to be this specific of course. What do you think?

1 Like

Good idea. I’ll have to look into it.

Edit: Do you have an example for it? I can’t find anything useful on Google.

Sure. One example from Stackoverflow:

You can also achieve this in Github. There is a documentation for that: Configuring issue templates for your repository - GitHub Docs

Basically, Instead of having blank editor, you are having prefilled editor which asks couple of questions.

Example template:

General Information:

Operating System: {Your operating system}
Server: {Your in-game server}
phBot Version: {Your phbot version}
Manager Version: {Manager version if you are using}

Configuration

{Upload your configuration if you have one}

Description

{Please shortly describe your problem}


Fields within “curly braces” will not be there. User will fill those fields. Of course this is just a draft.

I meant specifically for Discourse since it looks like your first post is a Discourse forum.

Oh, I don’t remember that website. But I found this: Discourse Templates - plugin - Discourse Meta

Maybe this could help.