Triage and Workflow

Working with tasks and the board

Updated October 12th, 202694 views

Reports are evidence. Tasks are work. Keeping them separate is what stops a busy inbox from becoming unmanageable.

Reports and tasks

A report is one submission from one user at one moment: their description plus everything the SDK captured.

A task is the thing you actually fix. It has a task ID such as BD-42, a column on the board, comments, and an activity history.

Many reports attach to one task. When eight users hit the same broken checkout, that is one task with eight pieces of evidence — not eight items to triage.

Reports are deleted after the plan's retention period — 30 days on Free, 90 on Pro, 365 on Ultra — and the task's Reports section says so. The task itself, its comments, activity and properties stay.

The board

The board is a kanban view of your project's tasks. You define the columns, and each column is mapped to one of two states:

open — the task is live work
closed — the task is finished

The mapping matters more than the column name. You might run Triage → Confirmed → In Progress → Done → Won't Fix, where the first three are open and the last two are closed. BugDump uses the state, not the label, to decide what counts as outstanding — so you can name columns however your team talks.

Drag a task between columns to move it.

Moving several tasks at once

Select more than one card and the board offers bulk actions.

Cmd/Ctrl + click adds or removes a single card from the selection.
Shift + click selects a range within one column.
Dragging on empty board space draws a marquee over the cards it touches.

With a selection active, a bar appears with the actions that apply to all of it: move every selected task to a column, assign them all to one person, give them all a priority, or delete them. A plain click on an unselected card still just opens it, so nothing changes until you deliberately start selecting.

Each bulk action is a single request for the whole selection, so every card gets exactly one entry in its activity timeline — and if something fails, nothing is left half-applied. A bulk move, assignment or priority change notifies each teammate involved once for the whole selection, not once per card.

Reviewing tasks in the side panel

Clicking a card opens it in a panel beside the board rather than navigating away. The board stays where it is, keeps its scroll position, and the panel can be resized by dragging its left edge.

The panel is the full task: description, reports with their console and network logs, comments, activity, and the status, assignee and priority controls.

Stepping through a column

The panel header carries Previous and Next arrows. They walk the open task's own column in board order and stop at its ends — they never wrap around or cross into a neighbouring column, because a column is what you read top to bottom during triage.

J moves to the next task and K to the previous one, which is what makes a triage pass fast: read, decide, press J. The shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in the title, a comment, or an open dropdown, so they never eat a keystroke you meant as text.

Stepping respects the board's filters. Filter the board to critical bugs and Next visits only critical bugs.

The rest of the panel controls

Copy link copies the task's own URL — the page that opens the task directly, not the board URL with a panel attached. That is the link to paste into Slack, a commit message, or another tracker.
Open full page leaves the board for the task's own page.
Esc closes the panel and returns focus to the card you came from.

On narrow screens there is no panel: a card opens its full page instead, and a link carrying a panel redirects there.

Attaching reports

There are two ways a report joins a task.

You attach it during triage. A new report arrives, you recognize it as a known issue, you attach it to the existing task.

The reporter attaches it. With allowTaskAttach enabled in the widget, the reporter enters a task's number themselves — 42 rather than the full BD-42 label. This works well for internal QA and beta testers who already track your task IDs.

Files on a task

A task carries its own files, separate from the reports attached to it: the design it should match, a server log, the spec that settles which behaviour is correct.

The Attachments section sits under the description, on the task page and in the side panel. Attach a file with the button there, or drag one from your desktop and drop it anywhere on the task screen.

Files you attached directly are listed first and can be removed. Images and file chips inside the description are listed below them under From the description — they belong to the task too, but you take them out by editing the description rather than from the list.

A task holds up to 20 directly attached files; images inside the description do not count towards that. See Attaching files to a task for the details.

Comments and activity

Tasks carry comments for discussion, and an activity history recording what changed and when: column moves, assignee and priority changes, labels, the due date and your custom properties, each with the old and the new value. When you need the full history of a task through Claude Code, the MCP server's get_task_history tool returns it.

A comment you have started but not posted is kept. Close the panel, step to another task or reload the page, and the text is there when you come back to that task, in the side panel and on the task's own page alike. Files you added to it are kept for two days. The draft is saved in your browser, so it does not follow you to another device.

Cmd/Ctrl + Enter posts the comment.

Who hears about it

A comment, a move to another column or a changed property notifies everyone involved in the task: whoever created it, its assignee, anyone named in one of its member properties, and everyone who has commented on it. The person who made the change is never told about it. See Task notifications: who hears about a change.

The public portal

Each project can publish a public portal at https://your-project.bugdump.com. Reporters can view its public tasks, follow the one they filed and upvote it.

This closes the loop that most bug reporting leaves open. A user who reports a bug into a void assumes nothing happened. A user who can watch their task move from Confirmed to Done reports the next one.

When the portal is enabled, the widget automatically shows a "View reports" link in its footer — no configuration needed. See Setting up the public portal for what it shows and how to choose which tasks are public.

Task IDs

Tasks are numbered from 1 within each project, and each project has a short key shown in front of the number, so a task reads as BD-42. That label is what you share, and the number inside it is what reporters type into the widget and what you pass to the MCP tools.

Both /tasks/42 and /tasks/BD-42 open the task, and so do ?peek=42 and ?peek=BD-42 on the board. See Task IDs and project keys for how numbering works, how to change a project key, and what a rename affects.

Task fields

Besides its column, every task carries four more built-in fields, all editable from the side panel or the task page: assignee, priority, labels and due date.

None of them is fixed. The priority list belongs to your project — rename Critical, add a Blocker above it, delete the ones you never use — and labels work the same way. See Customizing priorities.

On Pro and Ultra you can add fields of your own on top, of eight types from a plain text box to a member picker. See Custom properties: adding your own fields to tasks.

Filtering the board

The filter bar above the board narrows every column at once:

Search matches task titles and descriptions, and highlights what it matched on each card.
Filters holds the assignee and priority pickers, plus the browser, operating system and device of the reports behind each task — useful when you suspect a bug is specific to one environment.
Labels filters by label, or by tasks carrying none.
Properties filters by your custom properties, with a control that suits each type.
Overdue shows tasks past their due date that are still open.

Filters combine with AND, and they live in the URL, so a filtered board is a link you can share. Active filters from the Filters panel also appear as removable chips in the bar, so nothing is hidden behind a closed popover — each chip carrying the teammate's avatar or the priority's colour it stands for.

There is no sort control: a column keeps the order you drag its cards into, which is the order everyone on the team sees.

Jumping straight to a task

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) anywhere in the app and type a task ref, part of a title, a project name, or a page name. See Finding a task: search, filters and ⌘K for everything the palette understands.