[Geany] Ideas for reducing duplicate bug reports

[Matthew Brush]

On 02/03/2012 03:57 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> [...]
>>> +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.
>>
>
> I agree with Frank, registration tends to stop casual reporters, who
> are not involved with the particular program but have found a problem.
>
> Certainly I will not bother to report a bug in software I am just
> using, but not involved with, if I have to jump through hoops.  And
> there is no way I remember what I used as a password last time I
> registered to report a bug for [insert project here] so to report
> again I have to go through the whole forgoten password fiasco.  Bah,
> too much trouble.
>

I'd agree somewhat for random Bugzilla/Trac installations where each one 
has a different login, but for something like SF.net or Github.com where 
there's only one login, it's much less of a problem. What's more, it 
takes like 1-3 minutes to reset a password, if you can't be bothered to 
spend a few minutes entering details for the bug report (in this case 
your contact info), what are the chances your report is going to be 
sufficiently detailed? And what are the chances that you're going to go 
back to the bug report, which doesn't know your email address to tell 
you of new comments, and follow up with additional testing, etc?

> Admittedly casual reports are varying quality, from ones where you
> want to shout "RTFM", to completely professional.  Just because the
> reporter didn't register does not imply any lack of intelligence or
> knowledge.
>

But it often implies lack of care or follow through, or in the case of 
SF.net that you might've forgotten to login because it's not required :)

> Perhaps we just need to be a little more proactive in closing them,
> after all they don't actually go away and it shows an actuve bug
> processing culture.
>

I see lots of active bug processing on Launchpad.net and various 
Bugzillas despite them requiring a login. They have a certain minimum 
amount of information needed to start working on a bug, and that 
includes the reporters contact information.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush