Plan of action to unfuck the Bug Reports forum for contributors and staff:
1. Rewrite or have a volunteer rewrite the contribution guidelines to better support players being able to research, determine some kind of bar of evidence required on their own for a given issue, and test things in EQEmu without being a developer.
2. Add a new staff role, Loremaster, as someone who basically curates the bug forum. Their permissions could be limited to nothing more than being able to edit post titles.
3. Create a system of tagging for the Loremaster. They edit post titles with a set of predefined tags like staff, volunteer code, volunteer research, and garbage. They mark submissions as garbage if they have no research and tell the person to make an effort. This allows people to talk in a garbage bug report until enough research exists to change the tag to volunteer code or volunteer research depending on what is needed, and finally they tag it as staff when they think something has enough research, contributions, etc to warrant the staff reviewing it.
That would get us 90% of the way there. Obviously a bug forum is still crap for tracking bugs but at least this allows a work around for most of the problems here.
The staff no longer has to look at garbage posts, they can choose to ignore unresearched posts which may be onto something, they can choose to fix posts which need code changes, and finally they can respond to bugs which the community fully researched and proposed a change for in order to approve and implement them.
The loremaster role which presumably is an established bug researcher/contributor has more control over getting items reviewed by staff so they don't feel like their efforts are wasted and ignored.
The contributor can actually get guidance on if their bug report has enough evidence and get a response from the staff without having to follow up endlessly on their bug report always wondering if it has enough evidence, if it has been seen by anyone, etc.
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