My guess is that about 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 people who experience a bug
with software bother to try to report the bug (or know that they can).
Of those people, my guess is about 1 in 10 actually find the place to do
the report (like on our site).
That means that of actual bugs experienced, only 1 in 200-500 are even
/possible/ to report. Sure, fiddle with my numbers a bit if you want,
but it's probably accurate w/in an order of magnitude.
Up to there, we don't have any control; but we can make things easier
from that point on. But we're not doing that.
Right now, once someone figures out where to post a bug (on laconi.ca),
they have to know that a bug == a ticket, and that they won't even see
the "New Ticket" menu item unless they're registered.
Then, they have to register.
Then, they get a cryptic and useless <SomeIdioticPythonObjectReference>
error message on every page. What does that mean? It means that you need
to validate your email address. Perfectly clear, eh?
Once you get registered and validated, I think Trac has a pretty OK
interface for logging bugs. But it's so impossible to get there, I think
it's pretty generous to expect that 1 in 10 people who find our site
manage to log an actual bug.
So, that means that only about 1/2000-1/5000 of actual bugs encountered
are getting logged. Not the best numbers for software quality.
SO, I'd like to change our system for logging bugs. Two main changes:
1. PROMINENT LINKS to the bug-logging system in lots of places. We
should probably add them to user and admin documentation, to error
output, and to the wiki.
2. No registration or validation needed for logging a bug! We
currently require all this stuff to prevent spam; spammers find
their way in anyways. We should use a SURBL or DNSBL and/or
keyword filtering to block spam links -- not registration and
validation.
If there aren't any objections, I'm going to start doing 1 and get Aric
to enable 2.
-Evan
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