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Stuttgart, Germany
Heiko is a long time open source committer. He currently works for Red Hat on the topic of monitoring and management of server and softwares systems. Heiko has received a master in Computer Science from University of Karlsruhe and has written two books on JBoss AS and Enterprise Java Beans.
Authored Comments
I see you citing Chris DiBona "open source is a hard business" - but do we really need to keep it that way?
The information alone that the user was giving is a valid issue, that needs some checking, so if the user does not want to get an account for the bug tracker, we as the ones with an account, can also just go ahead "hey, no probs, what exact computer model do you have .... " and then open a bug with that information and give the user the URL to it.
You are right with "registers for cool", but most often that is for services that they think they may use again (or have been using for some time without account).
The underlying issue is that users see a bunch of issues with registering and filing the bug and just don't think it is that important.
One option could be to allow for anonymous bug posting - like the reports that go to the Android play store account. You can't really get back to the user, but at least that issue is recorded in the bug tracker.
And then single signon helps: users that have an account on community.jboss.org can also use that for the Jboss.org Jira bugtracking instance.
And now to go back to "cool" - if submitting a (new) bug would also get points for the achievement/badge system, there would even be an incentive to go through the hassle of bug filing.
Another thing is that filing the bug itself is often too complicated. You have to choose a category, perhaps a severity etc. Especially the Bugzilla user interface can be very frightening to new users.
Here the category could be set up as default "- don'tknow" which goes first. This will put a somewhat larger burden on the developers to correctly file the issue, but it prevents the user from giving up at that point (and then if the user selects a category, it may be totally bogus anyway).