Though Opera Software's Quality Assurance (QA) department works tirelessly to find problems that affect end-users (that's you), it's impossible to test all possible configurations and to find all possible problems. Thus, we rely on end-users to help find the problems we've missed.

There are several methods end-users can use to communicate their feedback to us:

The BTS is the best method when end-users run into issues they believe are bugs and they want them fixed. QA employees at Opera Software spend much of their time in the BTS, filing and analyzing bug reports, communicating with developers, and verifying bug fixes. The system makes it easy to track issues and compile relevant information, so any developer viewing a bug report can quickly understand the issue and spend time fixing it rather than analyzing it and gathering information.

The Phantom of the Opera divx

In most cases, the bug reports we receive have all the required information, so there is no reason to contact bug reporters. In a small number of cases, we need additional information, so the bug reporter is contacted through the BTS.

Cape Fear

The Opera Community Forums and newsgroups are a great place for end-users to discuss issues and gather information before filing bug reports. The forums and newsgroups are not an official way of contacting Opera's QA dept., though we do frequent both the forums and newsgroups. Thus, there's no guarantee that an Opera employee will see your post, let alone act upon it and follow-up internally. Developers generally do not visit the forums and newsgroups, as they're busy coding!

Dazed and Confused release Cats & Dogs Under the Help menu on Opera for Desktop, users can report problems with the site they're currently viewing and provide a short description of the problem. This information is sent directly to Opera where it's collated in a database. We use this information to augment bug reports by indicating the frequency of problem reports. Reporting a site problem this way does not submit a bug report. Users comfortable reporting bugs should use the BTS instead.

Many of our development teams maintain blogs to communicate with end-users, such as the Desktop Team blog, Mac Team blog, Core Team blog, Opera Mobile blog

, and Opera Mini blog. Though these blogs do allow comments, blog comments are a suboptimal means of leaving feedback on a software release. Instead, forums or newsgroups should be used for discussing issues and the BTS should be used for submitting bug reports.

Your feedback is important, so please take a moment to think about which method is most relevant for the feedback you want to provide.