Since my January 24 post, I’ve discovered three bugs in UltimateBB. (Well, maybe. Rapid Testing holds two definitions of “bug”: a) “anything that threatens the value of the product” and b) “anything that bugs somebody who matters”. Under definition (a), these qualify as bugs. I reckon I don’t really matter, so under (b), maybe they don’t qualify as bugs. But I digress.)

1) After entering a message (in the arbitrarily and pointlessly narrow input box; arguably another bug, if I matter), I clicked on the “Add Reply” below it. Nothing appeared to happen for a few seconds, so I got impatient and clicked on “Add Reply” again. I got this message; note the latter two paragraphs.

“Sorry, we can not process your request. The board administrator has enabled flood protection for this function. You must wait at least 50 seconds before trying this request again.

“» Please use your browser’s back button to return.”

The last paragraph contradicts the warning in the second paragraph.

2) Being an exploratory tester, I returned to QAForums, and saw that my message had apparently not been added to the database; it should have been at the top of the “Today’s Topics” list. However, on the second page of Today’s Topic, the summary displayed my message, but ascribed authorship to someone else.

3) I prepared report (1) above, and clicked on Add Reply several times really quickly. I got a “Page Unavailable” message via the browser. When I returned into QAForums, my message containing report (1) had been lost completely.

There are still other bugs. Another contributor there reported that when he was editing a piece, he pressed Tab, which took him out of the edit box and on to the Add Reply button–so then he was typing into midair.

If you want to exercise your bug-hunting skills, try some Web sites. Most are easily overwhelmed from the GUI at some point.