How-to guide · chapter 4 of 10

The bug-report button

Show it or capture silently, what users see, and where their reports land.

BugTape can add a small bug button to your site so people can report problems in their own words. Their report includes what they did before, so you do not have to ask for steps.

What your users see

A round bug button sits in the bottom-right corner. Clicking it opens a short form:

• a title and a description of what happened,
• how bad it is: critical, high, medium or low,
• a count of the recorded events that will be attached.

When they submit, the report goes to your project with the last ten minutes of page activity. BugTape can suggest a title and severity from what was recorded; set summarize: false to turn that off. Screenshots and voice notes in the form are not available yet.

The button's small light blinks when BugTape detects a serious error. That invites the user to tell you what they were doing.

Show it or capture silently

Setup asks you to choose in its Privacy step, and writes the snippet for you.

Show it when people see problems that errors do not catch: a wrong price, a confusing step, a page that looks broken. It suits online stores, beta releases, staging sites and internal tools.

Capture silently when you want no extra button on the page. Errors, failed requests and requests that hang are still reported automatically.

init({ apiKey: 'bt_live_your_key_here', showButton: false });

With the button hidden you can still open the form from your own link or menu item:

const bugtape = init({ apiKey: 'bt_live_your_key_here', showButton: false });
document.querySelector('#report-a-problem').addEventListener('click', () => bugtape.open());

Position and theme

init({
  apiKey: 'bt_live_your_key_here',
  position: 'bottom-left', // bottom-right (default), bottom-left, top-right, top-left
  theme: 'auto',           // auto (follows light/dark), light, dark
  majorBugAlert: false,    // stop the light blinking on serious errors
});

Where these reports go in the console

Reports from the button go to Issues with everything else, grouped the same way. To see only what people sent, open the filters on Issues and choose Reported by users. On a bug, the source line says "reported by a user" for these reports.

Next

Tell BugTape who hit each bug and which release it was.