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Moderator | Posts: 7,109 | Thanked: 8,820 times | Joined on Oct 2007 @ Vancouver, BC, Canada
#1
I've been thinking a lot about it, all "trolling" and goofing around aside, and I realize that the problem is that we need a policy here.

Either we tell people to file a bug when they have problems, and focus on making Bugzilla friendly to end users, or we don't mention Bugzilla and the experienced developers and bug-filers act as an intermediary between problems raised in the forums by end-users and the engineers on the other side of the Bugzilla system.

If we don't mention Bugzilla on the forums anymore, this means we need a team of bug-filers who filter and distil the noise of the forums into coherent, well written bugs.

I think this is a good way to do it. I do some document control work, and I know how important it is to have standardized ways to communicate on forms. If we get a team of bug filers to work with our bugmaster, we can get a well-oiled machine set up where the bugs are clear and concise, and the signal-to-noise ratio goes way down.

What I'm talking about here is a kind of community support team. If the user doesn't give enough information in his post originally, or nobody can reproduce the problem, the bug-filers will "interview" the user to get as much information as possible, but in a much more "supportive" way than is possible in the harsh environment of a bug reporting system. The community support people / bug filers will then file a bug and post a link in the thread to the new bug.

I know this is happening to some extent already, but I really think we should stop telling end users to file bugs, when that tends to cause problems for everyone: duplicate bugs, vague confused bug reports, simple problems that could have been fixed with some help from a forum guru, etc, etc.

In fact, there probably could be some kind of suggestion on the bug reporting form that the reporter should ask about the problem on the forums first, before posting a bug.

As usual, these are just some suggestions for discussion. I don't really care if they are followed, I just am getting tired of the arguments and hostility around here lately, and I want to try to inject some positive, lets-move-forward energy.

And no. Before you suggest it, I'll tell you: I'm not filing an enhancement request.
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