Today I spent a good portion of my day migrating the TextFugu “bounty program” over to a brand new system that should make things oh so much easier to keep track of (the other half of the day was spent going through all the bounties – lots of catch up to be done after getting back from my funeral leave). Before, I would get your e-mail, and then put it on a spreadsheet, and things would get all jumbley. Now, I’m using an actual ticket capturing system which will allow myself (and others) to coordinate bounty checking without stepping on each other’s toes. I’m so happy for the new system, which should solve a ton of problems that existed before.

Migration

Migrating bounties over to the new system wasn’t that bad, though we’ll see how things go once pay-time rolls around. To be totally honest, organization of the old system was terrible (all that is fixed now). Rest assured, if anything, I’ll be overpaying due to my organizational snafus, not underpaying.

Here’s how it works now – sounds (and is) kind of clunky in some ways, but with more than one person checking bounties I’m loving the new process:

1. You fill out the bounty form, which is a form I built using Wufoo (I didn’t expect their service to be so useful and maleable, but now I can’t live without it).
2. After you fill out the information and hit submit, the data gets sent to bounties@textfugu.com, which automatically forwards to hello@textfugu.com (the general customer support e-mail). From there we will respond to your e-mail and say “thank you” (because you’re awesome), and then forward bounties we want to take action on to Lighthouse, which is a great web app for tracking bugs, assigning jobs, etc.
3. Within Lighthouse, we can assign the task to the right person (usually me, for now anyways), mark it as resolved (or invalid, if we decide it’s not something we want to do), and then from there we have a shared Google Spreadsheet to mark down bounties that have to be paid that month.

So, there are four web apps being used to make the Bounty system work, and make it work smoothly. Seems like a lot (and has more steps than the previous version), but now everything is kept track of, and it’ll be easier to get through the bounties on a more regular basis.

Note on Previous Bounties: All of the bounties from the last two weeks have been processed, but I didn’t send e-mails out with them. Due to the migration, it made it pretty hard to get e-mails out to everyone, but all actioned bounties have been associated with your usernames even if you didn’t get an e-mail. Jdkce, you did pretty well :)