Can we add "Bug reports" to the help topic please?

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Github links to this forum if you want to open an issue for the desktop version of Anki.

But there is no description which clearly states “Post bug reports here”. The add-ons category as an example does do that (About the Add-ons category):

Questions, bug reports, posts about new add-ons, and so on.

Can we please expand the About the Help category, so that it says something like

Topics specific to the computer version of Anki, and ones that apply to all Anki clients (Questions, bug reports, ect.).

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The average user often calls something a bug that is not a bug (e.g. add-ons problem, incorrect usage, just requests), so using Help for average users and Development for power users maybe to distinguish between actual bugs and general help.

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In that case we could add to About the Development category, e.g. like this:

Programming topics - questions about pull requests, add-on development and so on. If you have been redirected from github issues, please post in this category. Please don’t post feature requests here.

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I think @Shigeyuki is correct on the reasoning there. We don’t really need users to label things as bug reports, because they generally are not bugs.

I’m not sure we get much sizzle out of making that “About” more specific, because <sigh> not many people pay attention to those pinned posts [or the category names, for that matter!]. We can (and do) move posts whenever they are posted in the wrong category.

Interestingly, if this is to help folks who start out their message by saying “I’m not sure if this is the right place …” – those are almost always posted in the right place!

But we definitely don’t want everybody redirected from GitHub to post in the Development category – that’s only for things related to development, not for user issues.

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What about adding the following string to the help thing? No mention of “bug” here.

If you have been redirected from github issues, please post in this category.

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I’m sure you’ve seen people starting feature requests in GH. It’s probably better if we don’t do this. (I did like your original “bug report” suggestion :sigh: ).

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We don’t really need users to label things as bug reports, because they generally are not bugs.

This doesn’t seem like great logic to me. It may be a fact that lots of users post things as bug reports that are not actually bugs, but if you move all of them to a generic help channel then you’ll be ignoring all the actual bug reports as well. Surely the better thing to do would be to have a “bug reports” channel separate from “help”, and just move things out of that channel if (and only if) they are not actual bug reports. Or even better, have an actual issue tracker.

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There is an actual issue tracker – it’s at GitHub. Once the kinks are worked out here, if it’s necessary, a developer can create an actionable issue there that links back to the Forum thread. Other times a smaller issue will catch someone’s eye and they’ll just PR a fix with reference to the Forum directly.

Having a “bug reports” category here separate from “Help” would just create more administrative overhead with the need to move things between categories. Even when topics are created in the correct spot, they can start as one and morph into the other, so it’s not a very productive line to draw.

But all of this feedback is helpful, and is taken under advisement – even when you don’t see immediate action on it!

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I tend to agree that the current setup is confusing from a user’s point of view. If nothing else, maybe change the wording in the GitHub references to direct explicitly towards the Help catergory instead of “the user forum” in general? Otherwise someone (like me) have to spend quite a bit of time reading through descriptions of all the categories in the search of anything vaguly related to bugs, issues, or reports before posting.

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