What should we do about questions that are clearly identified as bugs in EE or an addon?
EXAMPLES:
Personally, I'd like to close these questions to clear them out the Unanswered Question list...
Can we get a new option when closing a post that allows us to mark the question as a bug?
Ideas/thoughts?
From what I can tell on Stack Overflow, most closed questions are usually deleted after certain period by the mods. We should probably be doing the same. So we should only close questions we are happy to delete from the site.
With that Safecracker question, I see merit in the answer remaining on EESE, as a "pointer" to the EE bug, and to avoid anyone needing to ask the question here again (which would no doubt happen if we delete the question). As Mark said, it's quite difficult for people to know whether something is a bug or whether they are doing something wrong. Also, even now that it is a reported bug, it may be months or even years before EL release a fix.
With that Matrix bug, there is very little utility having that on EESE, because it's a very specific issue and would be better handled in a private email ticket (however this is only because P&T have great free support and tend to fix bugs very quickly, it may not apply to other add-ons, and certainly not EL?).
I think we want to avoid "here's a bug I've found" questions (simply because they are only relevant to the developer of the add-on), but allow "this isn't working, might it be a bug or am I doing it wrong". Is that the correct distinction? The problem is wording that in a concise way which is clear to all users, and keeping a consistent line.
I'm unsure of whether this, as a 'discussion', merits an Answer or Comment, but...
If you close it as a bug, I assume it's still searchable as a question?
If we want to encourage participation and make this the go-to forum for EE answers, and you don't know your issue is a bug, searching for it on SE and finding a matching question that is identified as a bug would certainly be helpful.
I like consistency, so I wonder what happens if we start marking bug posts as closed items, while some are answered items. Is a response that the issue in question is a known bug with a link to the workaround an answer? Or should that just be a comment when the question is closed? Not to put the burden on anyone or assign responsibilities, but making sure the bug tracker link is there for known bugs when it's closed would be helpful too. (Of course the bug tracker is non-public now, right...? But maybe that will come back.)
I'm concerned. Most questions that end up as bug reports, don't start out as bug reports. They start out as questions and the bug report is the solution to that question. It's far better to pester the individual who posted the question, to select the appropriate answer, even if its a submit the bug report to… then it is to close the topic as non-related.
For example Problem with Freemember register form! [closed], not to pick on Adrian, since he's following the ideas generated here, but this question is a valid question that also has a valid response, that can be selected as the official answer to the question. But worse yet, the reason why the item is closed is 'invalid', at least from my perspective. That's kind of mentally horrific to my perspective of the site.
Is it reasonable to tell people that a question involving a PHP Error is invalid, because the issue is related to PHP and not supported here? ExpressionEngine is a PHP Application, every third party add-ons are PHP applications, by its very nature EESE should deal with PHP errors, so long as they are related to EE or an add-on. General PHP errors could be moved or closed as non-relevant, especially if an answer was never provided or selected by the user.
This also concerns me, because some third party add-on developers have decided to use the EESE site as their primary support solution. I think this is great. I'm not a big fan of GetSatisfaction, though I do like UserVoice. But I'm more of a fan of a central repository of EE knowledge (Q&A) and other details. I feel like EESE CAN BE that central repository in ways that the Ellis Lab Forums can't be, so I'd much rather see the response that this was a bug, rather than this was closed for being off-topic.
I salso agree with Mark and Adrian, that to the best of my knowledge, items closed for being off-topic eventually fade out of the system, at least they seem to at other StackExchange sites. So, then that defeats the knowledge base components of the site.
I'm all for keeping our stats up, but not by any means necessary. Abandon questions with no response, sure close them. Abandon questions with one or more good response (keep) and encourage more voting up of the best response. People are smart enough to know that a response with 3, 5, 10 or more votes is a good response and that they can give that response a try. But if a response CAN'T BE closed as 'bug report', then don't close it for untrue reason. I think in those situations, it would be better to 'collude' (in a more positive sense) with moderators to up vote the answer, that works, if the questioner has seemingly abandon the question.
I agree that we should close these with a comment asking people to send bug reports directly to developers or EllisLab (as the case may be) in order to discourage bug reporting here.
