How to Report an Issue

While using MusicBrainz or any other of the *Brainz projects, you will maybe find a bug or have an idea about improving a certain feature (or even have an idea for a new one). We would be very happy if you would share this bug/idea with us, so that we can fix/realize it. We handle these so called "Issues" with our JIRA bug tracker accessible here. That means that if you want to tell us about your issue, you have to sign up at this page and report the issue there.

Note: Anonymous reporting has been disabled because we received too much spam recently; browsing the existing issues is possible though.

When to report

If you found a bug or have an idea for one of our projects, the first thing to do is to browse the issues in the issue tracker (click here), to see if your issue is already in there. For this, you don't have to create an account. There is a great variety of filters to find your issue quickly (if it already exists). If you are not completely sure if an issue already exists (for example if the description of a new feature is slightly different than your idea), we still recommend you to report the issue, because a duplicated issue is easy to remove, whereas in the other case we would potentially miss a great improvement idea. After that, make sure you have enough information to supply when reporting (for ideas this is self-explaining, for bugs make sure that you can describe what you did for the bug to happen - this is required for the developers to recreate the bug). Finally, if you have any more questions about this whole process, feel free to contact us via our IRC channels or our community forum

How to report

As previously said, to report an issue, you need to sign up in our bug tracker and log in (or log in directly if you already have an account).

After that, click on the green "Create" button at the top bar.

A pop-up like this should now show up:

You now have to input any information you have to your issue:

• First you have to choose the related project. As normal user this would be the straigthforward project name (for MusicBrainz it is "MusicBrainz Server")

• Next you have to select the issue type. Although there are 6 different types, we only use 4 of them: Bug, New Feature, Task and Improvement

• Now an issue summary is needed. This will be the title of the issue, so make sure to make it descriptive.

• This is not necessary, but giving more detailed information about which of this project's components your issue is dealing with, helps the developers to work on this issue faster.

• Although this is not required: Please put as much information as you have into the description field, especially to describe a bug's behaviour (otherwise the issue will be closed if nobody knows how to reproduce this bug).
  • Say exactly which steps did you take to let the bug happen, regardless if your text is repetitive with that. You don't have to write an essay which needs to have formal style, you just have to make other people clear what exactly you were doing.
  • Then state what did happen in comparison to what you think should have happened. If your bug is directly visible on a certain page (without doing any steps), for example if a page's design looks somewhat mixed-up, put that link in the description too.
  • If you want more information about how a bug report should look like, click here.

• In case of an idea or improvement, explain what do you want to change/add and why this change/addition is useful.

• Finally, don't forget to state any relevant information/ongoing discussion in our forums/IRC dealing with that issue.

• Finally, feel free to attach screenshots or other helpful material supporting your description (especially for bugs, screenshots will help a lot).

Note: Dependent on the chosen project, there may be additional fields to fill (for example for Picard you can give information about the affected version(s) or the running environment).

When you are finished, just click on the "Create" button at the bottom of this pop-up. And then you are nearly done.

Stay up to date

After submitting an issue, you should always keep an eye on your issue, to answer questions to it. If a developer needs more information to a bug's behaviour, you should be able to give him this information. If someone wants to comment on an idea, maybe improving your idea again, you should also answer to it. To conclude you are finished, when your issue has been closed.

Congratulations! You helped to improve our projects.