User jude allred - FogBugz Knowledge Exchange

Release Notes: FogBugz 8.7.58

2012-01-26T21:32:54Z

FogBugz 8.7.58 is now available for Windows and *nix. What's in it?

Answer by Jude Allred for Release Notes: FogBugz 8.7.58

2012-01-26T21:46:25Z

This is a bugfix-only release.

The FogBugz 8.7.57 release contained a performance regression which impacts some licensed FogBugz accounts. The symptom is that some FogBugz requests, seemingly at random but at a frequency of at least once a minute, will take an increased amount of time.

This time is spent building a cache which is meant to reduce the response time of all FogBugz pages.

In many environments the time required to build this cache is negligible, however some environments experience a delay of 5 to 10 seconds, and we've had some reports of delays as high as 20 seconds.

We recommend using FogBugz 8.7.58 in place of 8.7.57.

Update 1/27/2012: 8.7.58 is currently only available for FogBugz-only licensed installations. A new FogBugz + Kiln installer bundle will be released in the coming weeks which will include FogBugz 8.7.58. Our support team has a patch which can be easily applied to 8.7.57 installations which will fix this bug -- If you're running 8.7.57 but still waiting on the bundled installer, contact our support team and we can patch your installation.

What web browsers does FogBugz support?

2011-09-21T14:18:55Z

Is there a canonical list of browsers which are supported by FogBugz? The System Requirements page gives a short list, but I'd like some more details.

Answer by Jude Allred for What web browsers does FogBugz support?

2011-09-21T14:19:18Z

FogBugz currently supports the following browsers:

IE: 8, 9
Chrome
Firefox
Safari: 5

We try to make FogBugz's functionality degrade gracefully in prior versions of all these browsers. You may not get new functionality as the product moves forward, but we try to avoid breaking old versions.

Unsupported browsers:

These browsers are not tested against or supported by the FogBugz team. They may happen to function, but have known display and functionality issues.

IE7
IE6 and earlier
Pre-Release channels* of Firefox and Chrome
Lynx

* Only the default channels of Firefox and Chrome are supported. E.g., if you've altered Chrome to use the Beta, Dev, or Canary channels, or Firefox to use Beta or Aurora channels, you can expect intermittent breakage as those browsers introduce new features or bugs. We'll fully support those changes once they've made it to their respective release channels.

Answer by Jude Allred for Why is a search 3x faster than an saved search which is 2x faster than an equivalent filter?

2011-12-14T18:45:02Z

Short answer:

Full-Text search + sorting has degenerate cases, and they become more likely when you're combining search criterias with filters (/saving searches) instead of using the search box directly.

It sounds like you're generating the title field programmatically (hence the "title:SpecialUpload" criteria) -- You could programmatically add a tag to the cases you wish to filter for (tag:SpecialUpload) and then filter based on the tag (a non-full-text operation) rather than the title (a full-text operation) in order to get much faster results.

Long answer:

The behavior you're seeing is most likely caused by combinations of the following factors:

Full-text searches (such as title:) are much slower than other search/filter operations
Full-text searches combined with a sort order can lead to a degenerate case, but even when they don't will be strictly slower than non-ordered full-text search operations
Filters tend to have sort orders, whereas searches you type directly into the search bar are only sorted if you specify a sort order (...otherwise they sort by a relevance metric)

There are two types of operations which FogBugz will perform when you run a filter or a search:

Result filtering based on values in the database
Full-Text search using Lucene

Filters, filters with a search component, and searches entered into the search field all make their way to the same "query parser". This parser extracts the full-text components from the query, runs them against Lucene, and then combines the Lucene results with the database column filtering requested by the query.

For example, searching for Jude status:active will retrieve full-text matches of my name, from Lucene, and then join that result set with the items from the database which match the criteria of status:active.

I'm leaving out a few steps here (like permissions checks), but that's the gist of it.

In your case,

project:Beta openedby:beta title:SpecialUpload

The Project and OpenedBy axes are filtering using the database, while the title axis is filtering against lucene. Because we incur the cost of interacting with the full-text search engine, this query is strictly slower than

project:Beta openedby:beta

which doesn't interact with Lucene at all.

Searches embedded in filters are slightly more advanced: the query parser combines the filter logic with the search logic in order to put together it's best effort approximation of the desired query. Since the search component can be arbitrary (and even contradict the filter component), it's possible to create some interesting results here. Regardless, it tends to be the case that queries created by combining filters with searches (rather than performing the 'equivalent' search using the search box) actualy have some additional implicit filtering criteria (such as sort order.)

e.g., a filter with a specific sort order (almost all filters have this) plus a full-text search component is going to be strictly slower than that same filter without the sort, which in turn is going to be strictly slower than that same filter without the full-text search.

I would guess that the multi-tiered performance profiles you're seeing are:

Non-full-text filters/search (regardless of sort order)
Full-text search (no sort)
Filter with full-text search (same as #2, but with additional filtering overhead)
Filter with sort ordering and full-text search

How do I disable Internet Explorer's Compatibility View for FogBugz?

2011-11-11T20:40:05Z

FogBugz is telling me that "Internet Explorer is using Compatibility View to display this page. Please disable Compatibility View to restore full functionality to FogBugz"

What is Compatibility View and how can I disable it?

Answer by Jude Allred for How do I disable Internet Explorer's Compatibility View for FogBugz?

2011-11-11T20:55:07Z

Internet Explorer's Compatibility View is a feature which affects how it displays web pages. When enabled, it tends to emulate Internet Explorer 7's behavior in displaying FogBugz pages. Since FogBugz does not support Internet Explorer 7, Compatibility View will cause FogBugz to appear broken.

To configure Internet Explorer to remove FogBugz from Compatibility View:

Open the Tools menu (Alt+t) and select Compatibility View Settings.
If your FogBugz site is listed under "Websites you've added to Compatibility View", select them and remove them from the list. E.g., if you have a FogBugz account hosted at example.fogbugz.com, make sure that "fogbugz.com" is not present in the Compatibility View page list.
If you or your company is hosting their own FogBugz site on a local intranet, uncheck "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View".
With these new settings in place, refresh your FogBugz page.

Note that if your computer is administered by your organization, you may not be able to access Compatibility View Settings or perform some of these sites. In this event, please begin by contacting your system administrators or help staff for assistance.

It's also possible that you may have temporarily entered Compatibility View through the course of using Internet Explorer's developer tools. To correct this, press f12 and change the Browser Mode to indicate the current version of your browser. Changing Browser Mode should also propagate a change to Document mode.

E.g., Internet Explorer 9 users should see a Browser Mode of "IE9" and a Document Mode of "IE9 Standards".

Release Notes: FogBugz 8.5.125

2011-08-05T23:59:57Z

FogBugz 8.5.125 is available for Windows and *nix. What changed?

Answer by Jude Allred for Release Notes: FogBugz 8.5.125

2011-08-06T00:01:11Z

This is a bugfix-only release.

There were only three changes in this release, and they were done for the benefit of...

All users:

Fixed a bug with attachment handling where attachments would not get associated with a case if the case where resolved or reassigned when attaching.
MySQL users:

Fixed a bug in our MySQL query generator which caused certain types of filters, searches, and other common behaviors to generate SQL exceptions.
IE7/8 users:

Fixed a JavaScript error which halted JavaScript execution on all FogBugz pages. This caused JavaScript-reliant items, such as the Wiki editor, to fail.
IPad users:

Fixed a bug which caused "Edit not saved -- unable to locate attachment" to be displayed when using the non-Mobile FogBugz interface to close an email case.

FogBugz 8.5.123 was also released for a short amount of time as a stopgap for IE7/8 users, and contained only the final two of the four fixes listed above.

FogBugz 8.5.124 was also released for a short amount of time as a stopgap, and contained only the final three of the four fixes listed above.

Answer by Jude Allred for Server Error in Kanban 2.1.7.13

2011-07-19T16:48:45Z

2.1.7.13 contains a switch in Kanban from using a homebrew JSON serializer to using the Newtonsoft serializer. Looks like the 2.1.7.13 zip file forgot to include the Newtonsoft.dll... I'll ping the author to get that fixed in the next version. In the meantime, 2.1.7.12 should generally work ok unless you have a very large Kanban board.

Answer by Jude Allred for How do I deploy a FogBugz Plugin?

2009-12-18T19:48:39Z

How to Deploy FogBugz Plugins

Deploying to Licensed FogBugz customers is easy- just upload your plugin to the FogBugz Plugin Gallery.

To deploy your plugin to FogBugz On Demand customers, the plugin must first be approved.

FogBugz On Demand Plugin Approval Process:

Now 85% less painful than it sounds!

Here's a concise summary of what must happen. You could also read the authoritative wiki if you want more details.

Upload your plugin to the FogBugz Plugin Gallery.
Send an email to plugins@fogcreek.com with the following information:
1. The name of your plugin
2. Your name and the name of your company, where present
3. An indication that you have read and agree to the Plugin Author Terms and Conditions
Your plugin will undergo review. The review is primarily concerned with:
1. Does it run? It must load successfully and not blow up on our testers.
2. Security Vulnerabilities in your plugin, especially XSS (See Plugin Security).
After the review, we'll respond to you with either the estimated time until your plugin will be made live to On Demand, or, if your plugin was rejected, we'll give you a concrete reason why.

If you've updated a plugin that has previously been approved for FogBugz On Demand, the update will not be available for On Demand until the plugin approval process has been repeated.

How do I deploy a FogBugz Plugin?

2009-12-18T19:48:29Z

I've developed the best plugin for FogBugz ever! How to I make it available to other people?

What kind of search queries can I perform in FogBugz?

2010-01-08T16:32:06Z

What is FogBugz search capable of?

Can I set a custom landing page for my fogbugz site?

2010-02-17T21:07:34Z

I'd like to change the default page that's displayed to users who visit my.FogBugz.com. Is there an easy way to do this? Can I do this in FogBugz On Demand?

Answer by Jude Allred for [Javascript] Clearing the content of a text input created with pgsrc=pgEmailSuggestions

2011-04-19T00:49:09Z

FancyPopups aren't using any caching beyond normal caching performed by the browser. In fact- they maintain their state unless you explicitly alter their contents.

If you need to do a hard reset of the popup's state, the simplist way to do that is to use the setHtml function to reset the internal contents of the popup.

I'm a little unclear on how you're using pgEmailSuggestions, but it seems reasonable that the underlying droplist isn't being refreshed. I'll work with you on this via Email and update this answer once we've figured it out.

When does FogBugz choose NOT to send an AutoResponse?

2009-12-31T23:31:59Z

There's some criteria... What is it?

Answer by Jude Allred for When does FogBugz choose NOT to send an AutoResponse?

2009-12-31T23:36:52Z

Criteria is as follows:

The message has not been sorted into spam. If it is sorted into spam, an AutoResponse will be sent as soon as the message is sorted into a non-spam area (as of FogBugz 7.1.6), so long as the rest of the criteria is still met.
The address that the AutoResponse would be sent to does not contain the strings 'postmaster','daemon','owner-','bounced','no-reply', or 'do-not-reply' anywhere to the left of the @ sign.
The mail precedence of the received email isn't set to 'junk' or 'bulk'. Until FogBugz 7.1.9, the 'list' mail precedence was also filtered against.
The recipient has received fewer than three autoresponses in the last hour. This is to prevent infinite email loops. There is a feature request to make this number configurable.

And, of course, if AutoResponses are disabled, FogBugz will not send them.

Answer by Jude Allred for Feature Request: Find and replace in the wiki editor

2010-09-15T19:39:07Z

(For FogBugz 8 and beyond):

Our backend editor (CKEditor) actually supports this, we just don't have it enabled (or properly skinned). We have a case open to consider this feature for a future release. Please up-vote this question (not this answer) to show your support for adding this feature.

If you're comfortable with javascript, you can use the javascript console in your browser to accomplish this.

This code will replace the first occurance of 'cat' with 'mouse':

editor.ck.setData(editor.ck.getData().replace('cat', 'mouse'));

This code will replace all occurances of 'cat' with 'mouse':

editor.ck.setData(editor.ck.getData().replace(/cat/g, 'mouse'));

Undo works, so feel free to experiment.

Answer by Jude Allred for IE9 RC - 'edit' issue broken

2011-02-11T18:54:04Z

Update: We traced the root of the issue to be an incompatibility between IE9 RC and CKEditor. This means that case editing and FogBugz Wiki editing will not function in IE9 RC unless it is set to a compatibility mode (via f12).

We're deploying a patch which will cause IE9 RC to default its rendering mode to IE7 compatibility mode, which is not pretty but is fully functional.

Once IE9 or CKEditor patches the issue, we'll return IE9's default rendering mode to IE9 Standards.

If FogBugz has functional problems for you in IE9 the current best workaround is to set IE9's Browser Mode to IE8. (This will also implicitly set the document mode to IE7)

Note: IE9 Beta users who have not yet upgraded to IE9 RC are not affected by the aformentioned bug, however will be affected by the new default document mode. They can override the default by pressing f12 and setting both Browser and Document modes to IE9 standards.

We've reproduced it- thanks!

Looks like they changed something between Beta 1 and RC which doesn't jive with FogBugz. Workaround (for now) is to hit f12 and set IE9's browser mode to IE8. You can return to using IE9-mode once we fix the bug.

Answer by Jude Allred for Allow HTML/CSS customization at the discussion group level rather than the account level

2010-12-30T18:06:21Z

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for the suggestion! I've created a case for this feature.

Answer by Jude Allred for Can we have URLTrigger put data into the POST body?

2010-12-30T17:45:47Z

This seems perfectly reasonable -- I've opened a case to address this. Thanks for the suggestion!

Answer by Jude Allred for Any plans to support an interface for modifying the pgPersonInfo page?

2010-12-23T17:44:39Z

Hi Daniel,

Yes, we do plan to add and support those interfaces in a future version of the Plugin API, however (as of FogBugz 8.2.22) such interfaces don't currently exist except for by way of client-side JavaScript using BugMonkey or the IPluginJS interface.

That said, this is not a feature which we're currently working on for our next release, and it will need to rise above other features in order to get included in the future. If this is something that you're blocking on, I would recommend taking the JavaScript route.

Since you're interested, I've bumped the priority of the feature.

Did the Groups table change in FogBugz 8?

2010-12-21T18:14:54Z

I have a plugin which queries the Groups table in order to ascertain certain permissions within FogBugz. As of FogBugz 8, Groups appears to be deprecated. Some installations don't even have this table. What's going on?

Answer by Jude Allred for Did the Groups table change in FogBugz 8?

2010-12-21T18:20:24Z

It is not recommended that FogBugz plugins query the permissions tables in FogBugz directly, as the permission model is still undergoing change. Wherever possible, use the built-in Entity Member Security

Here is a brief description (with schema changes) from FogBugz 7 to FogBugz 8.

FogBugz 7

Groups are permissions sets, and each project is permissioned by one and only one Group.

Table: ACL

The ACL table maps users to groups and indicates their permissions.

Columns

sSectionName (nvarchar(50)) - Name of the table the permission is for

ixSection (int) - Foreign key to the table named in sSectionName

ixPerson (int) - Foreign key to the Person table. The special value -1 is 
used for "all users"

iPermission (int) - Permissions level of the indicated user on the indicated group: 0=none, 1=read-only, 2=read/write, 3=admin.

Table: Groups

The Groups table holds one row for each client or department that you define for your security structure.

Columns

ixGroup (int(11)) - AutoNumber primary key.
sName (nvarchar(255)) - Name of the client or department.
iType (int) - Group type: 1=client 2=dept
sNotes (ntext) - Notes describing the group.

FogBugz 8

Groups are no more, PermissionGroups are groups of people who can be permissioned on a project. Further details on the current schema are available here.

Table: ACL

The ACL table maps users to groups and indicates their permissions.

Columns

ixACL (int(11)) - AutoNumber primary key.
ixPerson (int) - Foreign key to the Person table. The special value -1 is used for "all users"
ixPermissionGroup (int) - Foreign key to the PermissionGroup table
ixDiscussGroup (int) - Foreign key to the DiscussGroup table
ixWiki (int) - Foreign key to the Wiki table
ixProject (int) - Foreign key to the Project table
iPermission (int) - Permissions level of the indicated user on the indicated group: 0=none, 1=read-only, 2=read/write, 3=admin.

Table: PermissionGroup

The PermissionGroup table contains permissionable groups

Columns

ixPermissionGroup (int(11)) - AutoNumber primary key.
sName (nvarchar(255)) - Name of the client or department.
sNotes (ntext) - Notes describing the group.
fDeleted (smallint) - 1 if deleted, 0 if not
fCommunity (smallint) - 1 if deleted, 0 if not

Table: PermissionGroupMember

A table for determining membership in a PermissionGroup

Columns

ixPermissionGroupMember (int(11)) - AutoNumber primary key.
ixPermissionGroup (int) - The PermissionGroup ixPerson is a member of
ixPerson (int) - The person who is a member of specified ixPermissionGroup

Answer by Jude Allred for Warn against too new plugins

2010-12-15T22:09:31Z

Definitely a bug- Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

I've added comments to those plugins to warn about the 8.2 requirement, and will audit our other gallery plugins to prevent that same issue. I'll also update our version warning system to prevent this from happening in the future.

I apologize for the difficulty.

Is there a way to get free access to FogBugz? Are there Student or Startup editions?

2010-02-17T01:05:36Z

I still want to use FogBugz, but without the whole "monetary transaction" aspect. Are there any ways for students, teachers, or startups to get free access to FogBugz?

Answer by Jude Allred for Case Event Edit MIA?

2010-11-10T16:47:54Z

Hi David,

It's definitely available to you.

If you go to Admin -> Plugins, then click 'View all available plugins' at the bottom of the screen, you'll find Case Event Edit in the list and can enable it.

It's still "young" so we didn't want to enable it by default for everyone, however we're about to make that change.

Thank you for your feedback, I totally agree with you on the marketing points.

Answer by Jude Allred for What kind of user can just report bugs?

2010-01-21T18:02:54Z

If you want anyone to be able to create a case, you can set 'Allow public submissions' to 'Yes' in the edit page of a project. For anonymous users to be able to view the cases that they've created, they'll need to save the ticket that FogBugz provides them with when the case is created.

Otherwise, you can specify these parameters on a per-project basis. You can add community users to a project individually or by domain, or create groups of community users to add together to projects.

If you install the Community Case List plugin, you gain an enhanced interface for allowing community users to be able to view the list cases.

It sounds to me like what you most want is a publicly-submittable project augmented with the Community Case List plugin.

Answer by Jude Allred for Plugin Ideas Forum (What are your top plugin ideas and requests?)

2009-12-21T21:02:34Z

Update: done!

Syntax Highlighting

Add programming language-specific syntax highlighting to code snippets in FogBugz wiki pages and/or cases.

Plugin Ideas Forum (What are your top plugin ideas and requests?)

2009-12-21T20:49:46Z

Describe plugins that you wish exist, and vote on other plugins listed below. This poll is meant to serve as a guide for plugin developers, as well as Fog Creek's plugin development team.

If you're actively developing a plugin, feel free to comment and link appropriately.

Comment by Jude Allred

2012-01-27T22:48:54Z

A FogBugz + Kiln installer with this patch is not yet available, however our support team is able to patch your installation manually. Please email or call us and we'll get it sorted out straight-away.

Comment by Jude Allred

2012-01-27T22:47:44Z

If you're trying to download the FogBugz + Kiln bundle, this will be the case. See the updated answer for more details.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-12-21T18:17:17Z

@Michel Interesting... alas not 100% accurate. In the absence of any other filtering (which is actually fairly uncommon) search results are ordered based on Lucene.NET's relevance metric. The algorithm we use is "Oh Lucene, please do your best, but have the following biases: Weight title text at 2x the influence of other text that you index, and if you're indexing a case then add +0.05% relevance per case event and, if the case is marked as 'spam', divide the final relevance score by 4." Unfortunately this algorithm isn't very good, so it's largely more accurate to say "what relevance?"

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-08-11T15:37:45Z

It's available now. We stalled for a day so that we could do some additional testing on the FogBugz + Kiln integration component of the installer.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-07-06T15:28:25Z

@Rodrigue They were, however it's reasonable that additional optimizations may be needed. If you're running Licensed FogBugz, be sure to upgrade to the latest version -- we released a major search performance optimization about two weeks ago. Also feel free to email us if you'd like to do some performance troubleshooting. If Kanban is at fault, we can help the author push some changes through.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-04-30T19:49:49Z

Hi Sebastian, you can accomplish a scriptmonkey-like solution by using the BugMonkey plugin ( fogcreek.com/fogbugz/plugins/… ). Public items are public for everyone, so there's not a way in FogBugz to make a public wiki invisible to community users without using BugMonkey.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-04-26T17:40:20Z

A workaround is to use the search component of the filter. E.g.: (assignedto:"jude" or assignedto:"adam" or assignedto:"bob") orderby:"assignedto"

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-03-31T20:45:42Z

Done in FogBugz 8.3

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-03-31T20:44:51Z

Kiln can do this when integrated with FogBugz! kilnhg.com

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-03-10T18:19:39Z

What version of FogBugz 8 are you running? There was a bug in FogBugz 8.3 which could cause the problem that you describe, and it has since been fixed.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-02-11T20:21:13Z

Thanks, I'll dig into this.

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-02-08T16:48:41Z

Hi Dmitry, Just to clarify, is it that over time T.C.E. is disabling itself and needs to be reenabled, or that during upgrade everyone defaults to disabled?

Comment by Jude Allred

2011-02-01T18:22:01Z

Also see fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/…

Comment by Jude Allred

2010-12-30T01:06:09Z

@Daniel is correct -- There were some significant plugin issues with 8.2.22 so we pulled *nix release and have put future *nix releases on hold until everything is smoothed out. 8.3 is still intended to release simultaneously for both Windows and *nix.

Comment by Jude Allred

2010-12-23T18:13:02Z

The [AddSubscribers](fogcreek.com/fogbugz/plugins/…) plugin can do this.