SourceForge Support Documentation

Tickets Overview

SourceForge's ticket tracker tool is designed to allow for flexibility in how you track items of work that need to be completed. This includes bugs, feature requests from end-users, or any other task you want to keep track of. You can even install multiple ticket trackers for different purposes. For example, a large project could have individual trackers for the design team, the documentation team, the developers, and another for support. Each of these trackers can have their unique list of tickets, as well as custom fields, custom milestones, and their own "mailing list." Tickets can even be moved between tickets instances, even if they're on different projects.

Configuring Tickets

You may install or remove a ticket tracker via the "Add New..." link in the project menu bar.

Once installed, for each tickets instance, there are several configuration options available. In addition to the common tool options of permissions, Rename, and Delete, there are also these options specific to the Tickets tool:

Field Management

• Open Statuses: A space-delimited list of status options for Open tickets. All open tickets are shown on the default ticket list
• Closed Statuses: A space-delimited list of status options for Closed tickets. Closed tickets are not shown on the default ticket list, but are visible in various searches.
• Custom Fields: See the Custom Fields section for full details
• Default Fields: Check the boxes of the default fields that you wish to display on list views like the default view, searches, milestones, etc.

Custom Fields

If you are an admin on a project you can add and delete custom fields for your tracker. Custom fields can be used to track everything from a list of components to the relative size of the ticket, the QA person responsible for the ticket, or (hopefully) anything you can imagine.

You can edit the Custom Fields for the tracker via the Field Management page, found in the Admin section on the left sidebar of your ticket pages.

There's a button there to add a new field. Custom fields have the following options:

• Label: What the custom field is called
• Show in list view: whether or not this field should display in searches or other ticket listings.
• Type:
  • Text: Allows free form text
  • Number: is displayed as a free form text field, but will only allow numbers to be submitted
  • Boolean: a checkbox that can be checked or unchecked (ie., true/false)
  • Select: Offers users a dropdown of preselected options. The options are space-delimited, and a * prefix will designate a default selection (otherwise the first option will be the default)
  • Milestone: a milestone field is a special field that can be used to categorize tickets with an (optional) due date. Open milestones will automatically be added to the search bar on the side of the ticket views.
  • User: a drop-down that lists project members

Edit Searches

If you have a search that you want all users of the tracker to be able to share, you can save that search with a name, and it will be placed in the left navigation bar of the tracker for everybody to use. Commonly saved searches are "all open tickets," "all unassigned tickets," etc. You can use these saved searches to watch the flow of tickets through the system and make it easier for your development team to focus on groups of active tickets.

Saved searches use the search syntax.

Options

• Enable voting on tickets: This will enable the voting feature which will let users vote tickets up or down. Votes will also be indexed in search, so you can search and sort by votes.
• Email ticket notifications to: Most commonly used for sending ticket notifications to mailing lists. If you use a SourceForge Mailing list (or any other list-based using Mailman) for email notifications, you may need to set the following settings in the Mailman administrator interface:
  • For Privacy Options -> Sender Filters -> accept_these_nonmembers: ^[\w-]+@users\.sourceforge\.net
  • For Privacy Options -> Recipient Filters -> acceptable_alias: \d+@\w[^.]+\.\w[^.]+\.p\.re\.sourceforge\.net
• Help text: This help text will be shown to users on new ticket pages and ticket listings respectively. This section may be markdown formatted.

Using Tickets

Integrated Comments and E-mail Subscriptions

One of the fundamental features of the tracker is that every ticket is its own mini-mailing list. Ultimately this idea comes from another bug tracker roundup which called the idea nosy lists. The idea is that everybody who edits or comments on a ticket is added to a mailing list (along with anybody who subscribes to that ticket). That mailing list is integrated with the in-page comments for that ticket and makes it easy to keep up with the tickets in various trackers that interest you.

If you have your e-mail address set up in your SourceForge account, you'll automatically be subscribed to any ticket you edit.

You can also click the subscribe link (e-mail icon) on any ticket page to subscribe/unsubscribe from any ticket's mailing list.

If you'd like to subscribe to every change/every comment on the whole tracker there's another subscribe link right at the top of the mail tracker page.

Integrated Markdown-Style Formatting Support

Like the Wiki, the Discussion, and all of the other forge tools, you can use markdown syntax to create rich formatting of your ticket text or comments on tickets. For more information on using markdown syntax, see our Markdown Syntax Guide.

Creating and editing tickets

With the appropriate permissions, you can create a new ticket using the Create Ticket link in the left sidebar. Then fill in a title, any appropriate fields, and an issue description.

If you want to edit the main ticket description or fields on an existing ticket (again, assuming appropriate permissions), select the EDIT button in the upper right of a ticket. This view is similar to the new ticket view, except it doesn't display any new ticket help text, and there's space at the bottom to provide a comment for the edit.

If you just want to further discussion about a ticket, just use the comment field at the bottom.

Tickets may also be created and edited using the [Allura API].

Private Tickets

If a ticket is marked as private, the only people who can see it are the original ticket submitter and project Developers, and Admins. Other users will not be able to view the ticket, nor will they get email notifications for the ticket.

Moving and Deleting Tickets

To move a ticket, select the Move option in the upper right of the ticket view. This will then display all the valid ticket instances you have the proper permissions to move the ticket. Any field values that can't be converted will be noted in the move message.

To delete a ticket, select the Trash Can icon in the upper right of the ticket view. This will now be "deleted", however, it may still be "undeleted" if you select the + icon which replaces the Trash Can icon. If a deleted ticket matches a list view, there will be a "Show deleted tickets" link which will allow you to see them.

Ticket Lists

The default view will show all open tickets, most recent first. Open milestones are listed on the left sidebar and will each generate a list view for each milestone.

Searching tickets

You can do full-text searches for tickets at any time, but sometimes you want a bit more. You want to be able to filter results by milestone, or by who's working on the ticket, or by status, or some combination of the above.

Searches use the solr lucene query syntax. On a search page, like the Allura ticket search, you'll see a "Help" button which will show the different available search fields and some search examples.

Bulk Edit

To edit a group of tickets all at once, start with a list view, and then click the Bulk Edit button at the upper right of that page (ie., the pencil icon). Check the boxes on the tickets you want to edit, and enter the new values for the tickets in the form provided.