Frustration contributing to FCC(Incoming rant)

Hello camper community!

I’ve been having some down time here at my new job, has been kinda slow (i’m a mainframe COBOL developer who got hired for this new position in which they require someone with skills in both COBOL and JS, and used the platform’s earlier curriculum to learn JS. THANK YOU QUINCY and BERKELEY and everyone on the early tribe!!!).
I wanted to contribute to the community and give back some of the greatness that FCC has helped me achieve, so I decided to contribute to the FCC project, but I have found it very frustrating that A LOT (MOST of The issues BTW), of the bugs that are there for the beta, are mostly raised by people who are not willing to struggle for a little bit, and found by raising the ticket a way to cheat, or avoid sitting down and trying to figure out the answer to the challenges.
It angers me that there are a number of people like me willing to help move this into prod faster, but the sheer amount of issues raised now are just by people who have not understood the challenge nor want to struggle a bit, therefore consuming a lot of time from contributors like yours truly.

There must be a way to better organize the bugs, or to prefilter them in such a way that whoever raising it needs to provide solid evidence of them. Most of the cases you follow the directions on the challenge and BAM! solved.

Come on, people! This can go live much faster if you are just more willing to struggle.

Yours truly,
A sort of discouraged sort of contributor.

I get what you’re saying. A project like FCC needs volunteers who are willing to deal with many different levels of frustration. There are volunteers who dedicate a lot of time to triaging Issues. That doesn’t have to be you. Feel free to use filters like “confirmed” instead of trolling all the Issues.

Don’t take this as dismissive, but you are also experiencing a frustration of being a front-end developer (as opposed to your experience working with mainframes). The UI is always guilty until proven innocent. Every user error or intermittent outage gets reported as a bug, and it gets reported as a UI bug first.

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oh absolutely!
working with mainframeis very similar, but a bit more streamlined, so I think your assessment of the situation is right on that.
I’ll check on the filters, sounds like a good way to get to find the needle in the hay when it comes to the REAL bugs…
thanks…

You might also prefer looking for unassigned Issues on the Waffle board backlog. This might be more similar to bug tracking software that you use professionally.

Ok heres my input … Id like to help out … Im probably like a lot of others studying and trying to learn so i can get a job … I have been unemployed a long time ( a long long time ) and only within the last couple of yeasr found what id like to work at eg coding … so i have been working on learning to code for one year plus… and found i learn best by videos … really struggle with documentation … dont know why but i can understand and pick things up through watching videos but with documentation and explanations with text is a struggle … only the other day i bookmarked Freecodecamp contributing.md as i would like to figure out how to contribute to the bugs on beta … but im finding it difficult and thought i would be nice if i could just watch a video of someone just finding a problem and going through the process of what you have to do from start to finish then i probably would feel like i was able to do it … while it might seem easy to some im just struggling with it … and have put it off until a later stage as i am focused on studying and getting a job. It would also be of benefit for me to put on my resume that i was doing bug fixing for freecodecamp so it would be a win win situation if i was able to help out. Hopefully i will get around to it soon … and in the mean time maybe somebody would consider doing a video of picking a bug and going thorough the process step by step of what needs to be done and how to do it … and maybe others like myself would then understand and start contributing.
I am a fairly active member on freecodecamp and its the first website i open each day is and last one i close … and id love to do more.

If you can’t grasp how to contribute, I suggest you start with a smaller project. FCC is both big, complex and won’t accept changes for the sake of changes.

However, there is a way to help without having to bother with the documentation — regularly visit the bug tracker and read the reported bugs from users. You’ll soon see some reports get duplicated, repeated several times. It would then be helpful to comment that they are clones, eg. with something like “hey, this is the same as #6543, so it can be closed”. Then a github collaborator can close it for real and the bug list becomes a bit more representative.

Once you feel confident in your programming skills, you can also help resolving new reports by rechecking if they are reproducible, if the user made a mistake or asking for additional info. Sometimes users just ask for help there, while it should be done here on the forum.

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the last thing you mntioned is what I found bothersome

Free Code Camp is a teaching platform. We have thousands of students who are still trying to figure this whole mess out.