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
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