This is a weird one. In the past I’ve publicly sang the praises of the support team, but I’m currently experiencing extremely perplexing behavior in response to a bug report.
The bug is an old one that tends to crop up again and again: the order of operations in privacy rules expressions are not being highlighted according to their parentheses.
Normally, when you mouse over an “and” or an “or,” the relevant “phrase” of the expression is highlighted in a whitish-blue color and the entire expression also changes color. Now, only the and/or is being highlighted.
Here’s the weird part, Bubble support is claiming to have spoken to the Engineering team, and they’re both trying to convince me that this has always been the case. In other words, there’s no bug. Supposedly, privacy rules have never been highlighted in parts.
I’m not 100% sure that they’re wrong, I’m 1000% sure that they’re wrong. Privacy rule expression highlighting is currently broken.
This leads me to a couple of questions:
Is the support team lying about speaking to the engineering team?
If the answer to (1) is “no,” how is it possible for the engineering team to not know about a certain feature? Is the internal company documentation that poor?
Each situation is different so can not say to your situation what is what.
I’ve experienced similar and it’s not new, started around 2020, and was so bad at one point I recorded entire build sessions to prove beyond any doubt that what I was experiencing was true.
What I’ve seen is the least experienced support agents typically might not ask anybody and just try to brush things off, but if you are persistent, then usually more experienced agents step in to sort the matter out.
In regards to engineering not knowing, it could be that as the team often make changes and break things, which is part of why certain bugs creep back in after previously being fixed, then they may not have ever themselves known the expected working version and assume since the code they may review to answer the question is bad code…or they just test it as a user would see it and say it works.
Either way, one of the most disappointing aspects of the platforms decline has been in bug reporting, bug fixing and the overall experience with support.
There are some true rockstars on the team and they continue to overdeliver, unfortunately the chain is only as strong as the weakest link and from my experience what comes across as newer support agents, they are usually weaker links that can make support interactions exceedingly frustrating.
Do you have any screen shots or recordings of the feature working before?
Yeah I think I’ve seen you post these threads before.
No, but it would be strange for me to have a recording of something working properly. My concern is that the codebase is so messy and the internal documentation so poor that if it’s not in the Bubble Manual, the engineers don’t even know it exists.
Even now, you won’t be able to find anything in the Bubble documentation about how highlighted expressions work. They don’t tell you how the highlighted behavior changes as a function of the stage of the expression, you just have to figure it out on your own. Probably because the parentheses feature was an unofficial “beta” for several years before quietly being made an official feature.
It will not show unless parentheses are enabled. The highlighting is explicitly tied to parentheses.
Again, ask yourself how I know that “parentheses expression highlighting” is either not documented whatsoever or extremely poorly documented in your internal docs.
I don’t have a company account and yet I know that.
This is extremely concerning because privacy rules are one of the most important and highest-stakes places for the expression highlighter to work.
Again, it used to have a white-ish blue highlight over the correct phrase. It was specifically white-ish blue. I should not have to “prove” that a feature used to exist. This is getting weird.
I asked lindsay about this and she said it’s unrelated. It just means the text itself wasn’t visible. The official final word I received about this was “the engineering team even went back to a previous build and couldn’t find evidence of parentheses expressions being highlighted. Perhaps you can submit this as an idea on the ideaboard!”
So officially they are calling this a Mandela Effect even though I’m 100% sure that privacy rules had proper highlighting. Really bizarre!!!
