Issue Tracker Tutorial

To use the issue tracker you will need to be logged in to GitHub, and you won't be able to use all its features unless you are a collaborator on our repo (ask an Admin to get an invitation if you're not). Once logged in, go to the main fork of the mod on GitHub. There, you should see a tab that says "Issues" (between Code and Pull requests). Click this tab to open up the main issue tracker, which is a list of all the open issues. (When issues are resolved, they are "closed", which means they still exist (in case the problem comes up again) but they are considered finished. Thus, all open issues are all the issues we think have not yet been finished.) To see more details about an issue or to comment on or edit the issue, click on it.

##Reporting a bug or other issue From the main issue tracker, click the "New issue" button. Write a short title for the bug or other issue, then write a description of the problem. Click on the labels heading on the right and assign it appropriate labels (e.g. "bug" if it's a bug, "needs artist" if an artist is needed to work on it, etc). Preview what you wrote if you like using the "Preview" tab near the top, then click "Submit new issue". That's it!

##Adding a new idea If you have a new idea that you want us to consider including in our mod, add it to the issue tracker. You do this in the same way as reporting a bug (see above), with the addition that you need to label it with the "idea" label.

##Assigning yourself to an issue If you are working on an issue, it is helpful to assign yourself to that issue so others know what you're doing. You can do this by opening the issue in the tracker and clicking on "assign yourself" under the "Assignees" section in the right hand column.

##Role Labels Role labels indicate what skills or roles (coder, writer, artist, etc) are needed to work on the issue. They all start with "needs", e.g. "needs coder" or "needs translator". It can be helpful to include these in your issue, as some team members use role labels to look at only the issues they might be able to work on.

If the issue needs the attention of translators, you may find the language labels more helpful (e.g. "translation: Spanish").

##Filtering issues The issue tracker has a search bar. You can use this for traditional searches, but you can also use it to filter issues. This can be useful to search for issues of a type that interest you. For example, to see a list of all open issues that require a coder and are not ideas, search is:issue is:open label:"needs coder" -label:idea. GitHub has instructions and examples for filtering issues.

##Using Milestones Our project has several milestones that help us keep track of when we hope to finish each issue. In particular, the "Next Beta" and "Next Stable" milestones are helpful for checking whether we've finished everything we want to before a release. The "Long Term" milestone indicates that an issue is not urgent. The "Recurring" milestone is rarely used; it indicates that an issue will need to be addressed every time we make a release.