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It's almost a year ago that I asked this question on SO: Menu Accelerator Keys Not Showing Up (Delphi 2009)

The Delphi programmers here at StackOverflow were superb with their answers, and within 16 hours, I was able to conclude that this was a bug in the VCL of Delphi 2009 that was not there in Delphi 4.

So at that time I reported it on Embarcadero's Quality Central, Report # 68816 with the title: "Menu Accelerator Keys Not Showing Up".

I gave it a Severity of "Serious / Highly visible problem", and I think I was detailed in the description, even giving a link back to the StackOverflow question where they could get more info and screen shots.

It was noticed by someone at Embarcadero about two and a half weeks later, and under the Resolution Comments the comment added was that it was "Promoted to internal database".

I'm not sure what the "internal database" is - probably a bug repository - but that does not tell me at all what the status of my bug report is, since it is now over 10 months later and there is no indication of any progress happening at all. The status of the question is still "open" and its resolution is still listed as "None".

I would like to elevate the urgency of this bug report somehow. How can I do this?

+5  A: 

The bug is marked "High" in the internal database. There are two higher priority settings for bugs - Must Fix (roughly, should be fixed for next release) and WUpdate (should be fixed for next update) - so it appears that in the judgement of the QA folks for the VCL, there are higher priority bugs.

Even though I'm an employee, I'm on the development side, so I generally don't deal with customer service requests directly. Probably the best way of raising the bug's priority is having lots of people vote on it, and generally convincing the product area community beta tester leads to include it in their highest priority bug lists.

Barry Kelly
I assumed that a lot of votes could help. Then the question becomes, how do you make it visible enough at Quality Central so that it will at least give people the opportunity to see it so and judge whether to vote on it or not?
lkessler
Also, it is nice to hear it is marked as "High", but the Resolution Comments did not tell me that. I went from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2009 and did not expect that a part of the visual interface of my program would become broken by doing so. I would think that a bug introduced in the VCL that gives a visible problem should automatically be given higher priority. This is the first time I've attempted to report a bug via Quality Central because it was that important to me to be fixed, and I bet there are 100's of other Delphi developers out there that will be afflicted by this bug when they upgrade.
lkessler
The thing is this 'automatically'. There are lots of regression issues reported with any product. If every one of them automatically would get a higher priority, then you'd need a priority of -infinity. In this particular case: an issue of a regression between Delphi 4 and Delphi 2009. Given lack of votes, the fact that this occurs with the mouse but not with the keyboard (users of accelerator keys usually start with the keyboard), your report actually scored a very good priority! I agree your bug should be fixed eventually. To make it faster: Get more votes, or report an incident.
Jeroen Pluimers
+1  A: 

First to help you: Till this will get fixed, you can do an interceptor class. See here for details. Basically you must copy the Delphi 2009's unit in your directory and change the problematic part using the old source from Delphi 4 (if you have it) - a diff tool would help here - and/or by reading the Microsoft's documentation.

And to answer to the title of your question:

  1. Make noise and hunt for votes in Embarcadero's forums: .non-technical & .qualitycentral are the most appropriate. But don't cross-post.
  2. Provide a solution and include it in your report. (In the body - if is small - as attachment if is big)
Thanks plainth, That's an excellent answer. If I can find the exact fix and add it to my bug report, I'm sure that will make their job easier and may allow it to be fixed sooner. And like you say, I'll also have it "fixed" for me. Otherwise, going after votes or reporting an incident is not an appealing route to take.
lkessler