I had discussed in the past a two-tier bug reporting system. The community level should have some mechanism to report bugs, but as you say there is a real problem with over-reporting and white-noise when you do that, which bogs the developemnt cycles down.
So if you let the community report to one place, and have a handful of designated people “promote” them to the next tier then everyone wins. I like the idea of a plugin for clearspace to handle bug reports. You might even be able to use the existing tagging features to do it. We could then make sure that every community reported bug gets some response:
Opened new bug
Duplicate report (with existing issue number or thread posting ; also applicable to already fixed problems that have no issue number)
Wont-fix (for insane requests- like “can you rewrite Openfire in earlang?”)
Not-a-bug (for mis-reported issues)
So the plugin could perhaps leverage the tags even more by making each of those options a tag itself- so “reports” could be drafted by looking for discussions with certain combinations of tags.
Dangit jadestorm! You got me thinking about this too much, I might need to open up the API’s for clearspace now.
wroot: Im a beliver in simple tags, post them with the tag “bug” and Ill subscribe to all discussions matching that tag.
I agree with using “bug” as the tag for bug reports. Simple, easy.
You can get RSS feeds for just about anything in Clearspace. For example, you can get an RSS feed for everything with a certain tag or everything with a certain tag within a subset of data. For example, the RSS feed for everything tagged “error” within the Openfire Support area is: http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/community/feeds/tags/error?communityID=2 008 You can get this by clicking on your tag and then filtering by type / community. The RSS feed is autodiscovered in the Firefox address bar.
It would be great to have a plugin to help manage the bug reporting process. You can get the documentation and example plugins from the Jivespace developer community
wroot: Im a beliver in simple tags, post them with the tag “bug” and Ill subscribe to all discussions matching that tag.
yesterday (or to be more correct today at night:) ) i have tagged my reports with “bug”, so you can already use rss to find them, Spark bugs mostly. Also i have some threads with feature requests. So maybe i should tag them with “request”? Or “feature_request”? Or maybe “feature” and “request”. Well, this is not realy important.