16bugs News

Unexpected downtime

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:47:00 PST

Hi everyone,

Today, we experienced an unexpected downtime of about an hour (17-18 GMT) due to a faulty patch panel.
We worked closely with our data center to make the downtime as short as possible.

The patch panel has now been changed and everything should be back as normal.

We understand that you rely on 16bugs as an important part of your business and I would like to personally apologize with everyone for today’s issues.
We will add a complimentary week to everyone’s subscription as a way to apologize for what happened and to thank you for using 16bugs.

Please, contact support@16bugs.com for any issues or requests.

Take care,
- Michele Finotto
16bugs Founder

Basecamp & Campfire updates

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:17:25 PST

Recently, we had had a few issues working with Basecamp and Campfire due to changes to their APIs.

In the past few days, we decided to rewrite all of the code we use to communicate with these apps and we’re now happy to say everything is back as normal. Only issue is you need to update your account details for each of the services you use because 37signals decided to switch from a username & password type of authentication to a token based one.

Please, send us an email if you notice anything strange: support@16bugs.com.

More updates

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:34:00 PST

A few days ago, we announced projects archiving and now we’re ready to announce two more features we’d long wanted to add.

The first one is multiple uploads at the same time. Before, you were forced to upload files one by one, instead you can now upload all the files you want in one go, either when submitting a new bug or when you’re sending a comment.

Then we’ve added a submenu next to “Bugs” to allow you to better filter bugs sent to a projects. You can view those assigned to you — either new, open or closed —, those you sent and the ones assigned to other developers.

To improve the user experience we now remember where you came from when you go to a bug’s page. Basically, if you filter bugs — e.g. new bugs assigned to you — and click on a bug in the list, you are taken to that bug’s page. Links on that page to go back to the list will no longer take you to the generic list — all open bugs —, instead they will take you to the list you were looking at when you clicked on the bug — in this case, new bugs assigned to you.

We hope you will enjoy these new features! And remember, use coupon code GIFTMAS when upgrading your subscription to get 50% off.

Stay tuned for more!

Archive projects

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:58:00 PST

We’ve just introduced a new feature we’re sure you’ll like: it’s now possible to archive closed projects so they will no longer clutter your account and, most important, they won’t count against your used projects. Basically, when you archive a project you automatically have space for one more project. Archiving is available only on paid plans.

We’ve decided to up file storage limits, too, so you can now upload even more attachments to your bugs.

We hope you’ll enjoy these two updates and given it’s holiday season, we would like to share a coupon code with you to get 50% off when you upgrade your subscription — either from free to paid, or from a smaller plan to a bigger one: GIFTMAS.

Shortcut to your bugs

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:59:00 PDT

When we released the new version, we introduced bug ids limited to the company, which we deemed as a very important improvement. However, we decided not to use those ids in URLs to keep backwards compatibility.

Lately, we realized how useful it would be to be able to have a way to build URLs using the internal bug id, for example, to use the autolink feature provided by OS X SVN client Versions, and generally speaking to be able to provide a quick link to a bug without having to log in.

You can now use the following schema to access your bugs: http://yourcompany.16bugs.com/b/XYZ (where XYZ is the bug’s internal id).

Basecamp and Campfire integration

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:39:00 PDT

Basecamp has become the de-facto standard for project management for small development teams: it allows everyone on the team to easily communicate with each other and with clients, without having to wrestle with emails, CCs, etc. Everything is there and you know you can always send a message to the people you need to talk with it with a simple push of a button.

We use Basecamp every single day and thought it might be extremely useful to be able to import projects and clients from our Basecamp account into our 16bugs account, so we decide to integrate the two services.

Simply go to your company’s “Settings” tab and you’ll see a Basecamp box in the sidebar. Enter your details and you’re set! Now, when you create a new project or a new group, you’re offered with the opportunity to import it from Basecamp.

You can also bind already created members with their Basecamp counterparts: go to the “All People” tab and click the small Basecamp icon next to the person you’d like to bind. By binding all of the members, they’ll automatically be added to projects you import from Basecamp, if they have access to it.

This feature is available on all plans!

And it’s not over. There’s another app from 37signals we’ve integrated with 16bugs: Campfire.

Campfire is a great tool to chat with your team, so we thought it might be very useful to receive notifications about new bugs and updates in your chat room if you’re already there chatting with your teammates.

To activate it you need to be on a paid plan, then simply goes to your company’s “Settings” tab and right below the Basecamp box you’ll see a Campfire box: enter the details and off you go.

We recently introduced a 30-day free trial on all new companies, but if you’ve already created your company and you’d like to try out the new Campfire integration along with all of the other features available on premium plans, simply drop us an email and we’ll enable the free trial on your account.

Instead, if you’re ready to upgrade your account, here’s a coupon to get 50%-off on your first invoice: GIMMECAMPFIRE.

There’s more in the working, so stay tuned!

30-day Free Trial

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:09:00 PDT

We’ve been putting a lot of effort in making 16bugs one of the best bug trackers around, but we recently realized the real juice is available on paid plans only, which might deter some from trying 16bugs at its fullest.

We’re quite sure you’ll love 16bugs after playing with it for a while, which is why we’ve decided to provide a 30-day free trial on all new companies. When you create a new company, you can now pick any plan and you’ll get a 30-day free trial after which you’ll decide wether you’d like to keep it or not.

If you’ve already created a free company, just send us an email stating your company’s subdomain and the plan you’d like to try and we’ll enable your free trial.

Stay tuned for another update coming before the end of the week! :)

Spam filtering

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:04:35 PDT

Just a quick update to let you know we’ve added spam filtering for those using anonymous submission: bugs and comments submitted by anonymous users will be filtered for spam.

Of course, you can recover false positives or mark a comment that passed the filter as spam.

Stay tuned for more updates coming very soon.

Have you tried Fluid?

Thu, 22 May 2008 18:31:00 PDT

If you haven’t tried Fluid, yet, you should. With it, you can wrap web apps in their own standalone Safari-powered browser. This way, the applications will live in your Dock just as a regular app would do. You’ll be able to close your browser, but still have a look at your favourite web apps.

The app is free and runs only on Mac OS X. If you’re on Windows or Linux, you can check out Prism which is similar to Fluid, but developed by Mozilla.

16bugs is a great candidate for a dedicated app, so here is an icon you can use with Fluid. :)

Reply to emails

Mon, 12 May 2008 18:14:00 PDT

Today, we’re announcing one of the most wanted features of all times: replying to notification emails!

When you receive a notification email simply hit the reply button in your email client and enter the comment you want to submit above the line:

========== Reply ABOVE this line to submit a comment ==========

It’s that easy! No need to login to your account, which is extremely useful when you’re on the go and have only access to a mobile device. Keep in mind you can’t post attachments using this method. If you need to upload a file you’ll still need to log into your account.

But there’s one more thing…

Posting a comment via email is awesome, but what if you could update the bug, too?

Simply add a line like this anywhere in the reply area (it won’t appear in the comment on the website):

@16bugs: assign:user status:verified priority:high

Parameters don’t need to be exact matches: the closest match will be picked automatically. For example, assign:doe will match a developer named John Doe, status:v will match status Verified and priority:s will match priority Severe. You get it. :)

This feature is available on all paid plans, so if you haven’t upgraded, yet, here is a chance to upgrade your account with a 50% discount for the first month: simply use coupon code IWANTEMAILS at checkout.

We’re already working on a bunch of new features…SVN integration anyone? Keep an eye on the blog to know what we’re up to and subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already.

Overview projects sort order

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:33:00 PDT

Just a quick update to let everyone now we’ve changed the sort order for projects on the Overview page.

Previously, they were sorted by name, which is fine when you have just a couple of projects, but gets very frustrating when you have 5, 10, 15 or more projects and you need to know what happened with a quick glance at the list.

Projects are now sorted by most recent activity, thus the one at the top is the one which was updated most recently, while the one at the bottom is the one who has received the less love. ;)

We hope you’ll enjoy the update. As always, feel free to comment.

P.S. Replying to email notifications is nearing launch time and is looking swell: you’ll also be able to make changes to a bug by replying to the email.

What's cooking?

Wed, 07 May 2008 01:00:33 PDT

In the last post, we told you we’ve got a lot of things in the pipeline for 16bugs.
And we ought to make that true, indeed, we’re getting ready to release a new feature you and us have all been waiting for for quite a long time. What is it, you ask?

In a few days we’ll allow you to post a comment to a bug via email!
If you’re on a paid plan, you’re already receiving emails when something happens on a bug you’re watching. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to open a browser just to send a quick comment to a bug, or it simply would be much faster to reply to the notification email from within your mail client.
Of course, it makes life much easier for those reading emails from a mobile device, too.

We’re currently testing the feature on a few selected accounts and, if all goes according to plans, we’ll launch it in just a few days.

Two years old

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:32:54 PDT

Two years ago, I launched 16bugs and let me tell you so far it’s been an amazing ride.

This year was a special one for our beloved 16 ladybugs, indeed, back in December 2007, “we”:http://blog.wonsys.net/ launched the all new version which was a huge leap forward.
And we’ve still got a lot of new stuff we’d love to introduce during the next year, so watch out.

To celebrate the second anniversary with all of you, we’re adding an extra week to all of our loyal subscribers.
And for those who haven’t upgraded, yet — or if you’d like to move to a bigger plan —, this is the right time: use coupon code “*two*” and get 50% discount for up to one year.
Yep, you can upgrade your account to a bigger plan for up to 12 months — or just one, if you prefer — and pay only for 6!

SSL and bigger plans

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:17:37 PST

Today, we’re introducing something we wanted to add for a long time: secure SSL connection.
SSL is available on bigger plans only. However, it’s always active when logging in and signing up, as we want to make sure you feel safe when entering your account details.

Since a few people have asked for bigger plans, we decided to create two new plans:

* *Plus*: 25 projects and 3GB for only $49/month
* *Premium*: 100 projects and 10GB for $99/month

Sure enough, both plans come with RSS and email notifications, anonymous submission and SSL connection.

A couple of new features

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:35:23 PST

Two months have passed since we launched the new version of “16bugs”:http://16bugs.com/ and the response has been mostly ecstatic.
We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback since the launch and we’d like to thank everyone for sending emails and bug reports our way.

Today, we’re introducing a few features which have been highly requested:

* Change group to a member of a company (very easy: just drag and drop)
* Invite a new person from the project’s people page
* And, finally, _customizable custom fields_: you can now choose between check box, select, text area and text field when creating a custom field

Please, keep sending your feedback as we’re constantly working to improve 16bugs.

BTW, just drop us a line if you’d like to test the API.

The New 16bugs

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:40:06 PST

It’s been a long time coming, but today we’re very happy to introduce the new version.

This is not _just_ an upgrade, indeed, the app was *completely* rewritten from scratch.
16bugs was working fine, but we felt the need to make it better, to implement some of the feedback we’d been getting in the past months and there’s no way we could build what we had in mind without starting from a blank slate.

Today, we’re releasing the first part of the upgrade, with a few more features coming in the next weeks.

This upgrade includes:

* Custom member groups inside each company (no more Project Manager, Developer and Beta Testers)
* Per-project permissions for each single member of the company
* Project activity to always be on top of what’s happening
* Improved syndication feeds and email notifications
* Watch single projects/bugs via email
* Ability to pay in advance for more than one month
* Bug IDs limited to company
* Increased upload size (because 1MB wasn’t enough) and no more limits on which files you can upload
* Refined UI and lots of small tweaks

We tried to make the app even simpler while adding a few missing things here and there.
We hope you’ll enjoy the update.

For those of you wondering why the API isn’t there, yet, don’t worry, it’s here and it’s working, indeed, we’ll be starting a private beta tomorrow.
Please, let us know if you’d like to help us test the API.

To celebrate this release with you, here’s a coupon code to get 50% off when upgrading or extending your subscription for up to 1 year: *newbugs*.

As always, please, “submit a bug”:http://16bugs.16bugs.com/ if you notice anything strange.
Or just send an email to support@16bugs.com if you’d like to tell us what you think about the new version.

The new version is coming

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:44:37 PST

You might already know it, but the all new version of “16bugs”:http://16bugs.com/ is almost here, which is why we’ve been so quiet lately.
A lot of thought went into it and we’ve been busy the past few weeks putting that thought into code.

There will be a lot of improvements, like per-project permissions, activity on each project — here, we adopted an a-la “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com/ approach, since I personally think it’s very useful to have a quick look at the activity and immediately being able to understand what happened —, better RSS feeds, per-bug email notifications and, finally, a fully working API — which will be released in the days after the launch —. Plus, a lot of small tweaks which will definitely improve the overall experience.

You might be wondering how long it will take for us to release the new version.
Well, it’s almost done, indeed, we should be running a private beta starting today or tomorrow — “let us know”:support@16bugs.com, if you’d be interested in taking part in it, keep in mind we won’t migrate your account, so you’ll be free to test and break things as you like without risking to lose your data.
If everything works fine, we’ll be launching the new version before the end of the year, otherwise we’ll wait a few more days and release it in 2008.

Now, back to “TextMate”:http://macromates.com/! :)

Europe's Young Entrepreneurs 2007

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:43:13 PDT

Last week, I was flattered to discover I’d been nominated by “BusinessWeek”:http://www.businessweek.com/ for it’s annual contest to find the best European entrepreneur under 26.

Given it all started with “16bugs”:http://16bugs.com/ “more than a year ago”:http://finotto.org/2006/03/27/16bugs-launched/, I felt like I ought to share this with all of you using 16bugs and making it what it is today.

You can “read the article”:http://tinyurl.com/yoltbs, “my bio”:http://tinyurl.com/yrhnnn and, in the end, “*vote for me!*”:http://tinyurl.com/2bzzwh :)

P.S.
We’re currently planning a general overhaul of 16bugs which will hopefully see the light in Q4, so make sure you send your feedback to “our Google Group”:http://groups.google.com/group/16bugs or send an email to support@16bugs.com.
Help us make 16bugs better!

Should we close the forum?

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:32:26 PDT

Lately, we’ve been getting quite a good amount of SPAM on “our forum”:http://forum.16bugs.com/ and while we’ve got protections in place, a few messages a day still manage to get through.
That’s why I was thinking about moving the forum to “Google Groups”:http://groups.google.com/ which would also allow to use it as a mailing list — it’d be nice to make sure we’re always on top of what’s happening.

Having a hosted forum is good, but I must say that the latest version of Google Groups is not bad either. Indeed, we decided to go that way when we launched “Pagety”:http://pagety.com/.
By using it for 16bugs, too, you’d be able to use it as a forum or as a mailing list. Plus, we should be better protected from SPAM, because of Google’s great filter.

What do you think? should we move it?

Happy Birthday!

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:53:25 PDT

Today, we’re celebrating 16bugs’ first birthday. Indeed, it was exactly one year ago when I “announced the launch on my blog”:http://finotto.org/2006/03/27/16bugs-launched/.

I must be honest here and say I would’ve liked to release a new version just in time for the first birthday, but the launch of “Pagety”:http://pagety.com/ really got into my plans, so we’ll have to wait a bit more to see it live. But fear not, it will come!

And as a way to celebrate, all our premium users will receive a free extra month on their subscription!
If you haven’t upgraded, yet, this is the time: upgrade your account before Sunday (April 1st) and we will add an extra month to your subscription.