Public bug reported:
It took me, a very experienced computer user, about 45 minutes to report
a very simple bug report. This is completely unacceptable, because it
means that 99% of normal users who are trying to help will be unable to
report bugs. The following are various issues I ran into:
1)
Discoverability: users have no way of knowing that the "bug-report" command
exists.
2)
Every page I found, navigated to, and Google searched for in launchpad.net for
10-15 minutes did NOT have any way to report a bug. I expected to be able to
report a bug on the following pages, preferably as a giant button:
- having just logged in
- having just created a new user account
- the main page (instead takes you to some terrible "before reporting a bug"
page disguised as a bug-reporting page, which succeeds in nothing except saying
"in order to report a bug you must read through 10 pages of text about stuff
you have no hope of understanding if you are a regular user" -- this
information should be furnished by an automatic tool such as bug-report, with
the user being prompted for more information by developers if required)
- the aforementioned "before reporting a bug" page
- on the page of any another bug report
- on the main non-ubuntu launchpad.net page (it should then prompt to where you
wish to report a bug to)
- on various random pages on launchpad.net
For example, on code.google.com, you can report a bug anywhere.
3)
password policy: the launchpad.net password policy is terrible, requiring 8+
characters (completely fine), but rather arbitrarily a number and capital
letter. (are the password hashes even salted?). it is the only site on the
internet that has forced me to create a plaintext file containing my username
and password. I rather recommend a more liberal policy, for example insisting
the password contain 2 of {letters,numbers,capital letters,punctuation}, but
not lowercase+number. perhaps some other metric.
4) attempting to reset one's password does not work, because it takes
over 10 minutes to receive the password recovery email; by that time,
most users will have lost interest in being good samaritans
5) I had to recreate a bug report because I only learned about the bug-
report command after submitting my first report
6) users cannot delete/close their own bug reports or edit posts they
have made, before others have replied to them
minor points)
"bug-report -p linux" complains that the -p option is obsolete; I am concerned
this shows that very few users are using this tool
** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: launchpad launchpad.ne usability
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/746905
Title:
Bug reporting is impossible
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