[development] {Short issue queues need care - 7} Why we shouldn't close all issues without proper review.

[Gary Feldman]

Jeremy Epstein wrote:
> Sounds like a good idea. Ideally, we would remove all the 'support'
> forum areas, and we would instruct users to submit all support
> requests as issues. But that, of course, is completely unrealistic:
> people are always going to post support requests in the forums.
People are always going to post support requests in the forums.
People are always going to post bug reports in the forums.
People are always going to post support requests in the issue tracker.
People are always going to post bug reports in the issue tracker.

People are notoriously bad at figuring out whether something is a bug or 
a support request.  The same question is often both (i.e., yes it's a 
bug, here's a workaround).

There are no perfect solutions, short of eliminating one or the other 
submission mechanisms entirely.  The best that can be hoped for is to 
make it easy to convert from one to the other, and that's not trivial.  
Personally, I believe that new open source projects should sidestep the 
problem by picking exactly one mechanism, but once several mechanisms 
have become entrenched, it's difficult to remove them.

In the meantime, there are lots of ways to improve forum search, 
starting with the categorization already mentioned.

Gary