[Geany] Ideas for reducing duplicate bug reports

[Matthew Brush]

On 02/03/2012 02:32 AM, Frank Lanitz wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:54:26 +1100
> Ross McKay<rosko at zeta.org.au>  wrote:
>
>> Matthew Brush wrote:
>>
>>> I feel split on the issue TBH. At least with something like Github,
>>> it might not be "yet another thing to sign up for" like all the
>>> separate Bugzilla/Trac installations. There's some chance that the
>>> user will have a Github account, though it's probably not *that*
>>> likely, it's still useful for other things (same as SF.net account).
>>>
>>> I can understand wanting to make it easy to report bugs, but at the
>>> same time I can understand the argument that requiring registration
>>> will likely lead to better bug reports, ex. from people who are
>>> helping with testing. Many of the current "Nobody"/Anonymous bug
>>> reports are quite vague, quickly written, and even sometimes having
>>> a strange "attitude" in them. What's more since it's so easy, the
>>> reporters are probably more likely to quickly fill in the form and
>>> submit it before even bothering to search for duplicates or to know
>>> the bug reporting procedure outlined on the website (at least that's
>>> my theory).
>>>
>>> My personal opinion is that it's better to get less really good
>>> reports from testers in the community than to get many
>>> vague/duplicate bug reports from random anonymous people who are
>>> just pissed off because a bug is annoying them.
>>> [...]
>>
>> +1 to everything above. I reckon that many of those anonymous bug
>> reports are next to worthless for their minimal detail and that means
>> they end up reducing the signal to noise ratio. If someone isn't
>> already a member of either SF or GH and won't join up in order to
>> submit a bug report, what are the chances that the bug report is both
>> sufficiently detailed and not a duplicate?
>
> I can tell only for myself: I found a couple of bugs on wordpress, and
> some misbehaviors und firefox and a couple others more. As the I'm
> forced to register a new account on their plattforms the mood to report
> went against 0 so a couple of them I just fixed locally and didn't
> report upstream. Shame on me. But I don't want to do a 10min register
> marathon just for reporting one line is suboptimal. I'm fine with a
> bigger number of noise, if there are a bunch of maybe new reports which
> we wouldn't get else wise.
>

But you already have a SF.net and Github.com login :)

And if you didn't, IIRC at least for Github it takes maybe 30 sec. to 1 
minute to register. Name, email, password, confirm, done. If you can't 
be bothered to spend a minute to enter a little detail, what are the 
chances your report is going to be sufficiently detailed? And then, 
having no way to contact you besides comments on the report, what are 
the chances you're going to follow up, possibly testing some new 
commit/version/dependency?

Just sayin...

Cheers,
Matthew Brush