Send the bug, not the steps: a clickable copy of the page for bug reports

Record the reproduction#

1. Add Replayink to Chrome. It also runs in Microsoft Edge.
2. Go to the screen where the bug starts and press Shift+R, or press the ● button on the toolbar. After a 3-2-1 countdown a small dock appears.
3. Do what reproduces the bug, one action at a time. Every click, typed value, choice, drag, scroll, dialog and page change becomes a step.
4. When the bug shows, hold A and draw an arrow at it. Let go, and the next click goes to the app again.
5. Press Stop. The player opens with the recording.
6. Press Edit, give the failing step a title such as "Total shows 0 after discount", and write what was expected in its note.
7. Press Share link. The address is on your clipboard.

Each step is a copy of the real page at that moment: the form state, the open dialog, the error text. The developer sees what you saw, not a description of it.

Link to the failing step#

End the link with #s=9 and it opens at step 9, on the broken screen, with the steps before it a click away. Put that in the ticket's first line. Add ?autoplay=1 instead and the reproduction plays through on its own first, with a cursor doing each step, until the developer's first click hands the page over.

Because every control you used is live, the developer can open the same menu or dialog you did and go back to any earlier step. What you never clicked does nothing, and the page says so.

Draw on it while recording#

Hold A and draw an arrow at the wrong number. Hold R for a box around a field, P for the pen, H for the highlighter. What you draw becomes part of the page: it stays on the field or number you drew it on, on every screen where that is. Shift+Space freezes the recording so you can annotate a screen without anything you do becoming a step.

Keep private data out#

Passwords, card numbers and one-time codes are masked before they are stored. An option masks everything you type, which is the right setting when the reproduction goes through a form with real customer data. There is no region blur: whatever the page showed is in the copy, so reproduce on a test account when you can, and look through the steps before publishing. Anyone with the link can open a published recording, with no password and no expiry; Unpublish takes it down once the bug is fixed.

When a video is better#

A recording keeps what the page did, not how fast it did it. If the bug is a flicker, a stutter, an animation that runs wrong, or anything that depends on timing, a screen recording tool like Loom shows it and this does not. The same goes for canvas and WebGL apps, video players, and native browser UI such as a file picker, which are not captured. And it keeps what the page did, not the network: a 500 shows as whatever the page showed, so attach the console or network log alongside. Interactive demo or screen recording goes through the choice.

Paste it into the ticket#

The link is the whole report. In Jira, Linear or a GitHub issue it is one line, with no attachment, no upload limit and nothing to download. If the reproduction changes, record again and publish: the link stays the same, so the ticket does not go stale. ?embed=1 puts the recording inside an internal wiki page.

What it cannot do#

The copy runs none of your app's code, so what works is what you did while recording. Canvas and WebGL apps, video players, and pages that keep redrawing from a websocket after you stop come through as what was on screen. Native browser UI is not recorded. Very large pages fall back to a screenshot for that step. It is not a video editor. One recording holds up to 500 steps.

Questions#

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