Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-20013000-20140908085042/@comment-452-20140912132723

My primary purpose here is to help everyone, not individuals.

I identified the issue, and instructed him to report it, then I gave him a method to bypass the issue for now. Him bypassing the issue without reporting it does not help others, which is selfish.

I want to see issues fixed, not just bypassed, and Wikia Staff would like to see people other than user:452 reporting weird bugs.

I recently reported that a wiki was using the "standard edit summaries" javascript addon poorly, so that any time the right rail was collapsed when editing, the summaries box overlapped into the editing area.

Wikia Staff told me that they didn't care about it, because I was the only person who had ever reported it.

This was one of the biggest Wikis on Wikia, with 112,921 Content pages and 464 recent editors, so I refuse to believe that I was the only person who has ever saw this issue.

What I think happened is that other people had collapsed the right rail, seen the overlap, then expanded the right rail again, thinking "The "issue" seems to have been mine. I expanded the right rail again, and I can now see the edit page clearly, therefore there is nothing "wrong" and I don't need to report it."

When I enquired whether Wikia Staff had any data on number of people who had edited there with the right rail collapsed, and therefore were definitely exposed to the problem, I was told they could not share that information - then the problem was fixed the next day.

So, if you see something which looks wrong or doesn't work right, you should always report it, especially when it is something that only happens sometimes under certain conditions, like using themedesigner at 800px, because actual usage reports such as this are valuable.

If I had noticed this in the past, and reported it, Wikia Staff would have likely dismissed it as a theoretical edge case. A report from someone other than me is more valuable, because it's an actual case of someone actually encountering the problem, rather than "Oh, it's just 452 being edgy again, file it under 'don't fix until someone else reports it'".

While I could still report it to Staff myself, and link the thread, I personally feel that I've already exceeded the number of times a person should use Special:Contact in a month, so I'd much prefer to encourage others instead.

I'd rather "teach a person to fish report problems" than catch fish report problems for them for the rest of their life.