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Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 20:17:38 +0200
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Subject: bugs.php.net usability, migration to a different tool
From: t.motylewski@gmail.com (Tymoteusz Motylewski)

Hi,
Thank you all for the great work you do for PHP!
I would like to raise a concern regarding the usefulness of the
current PHP issue tracker - bugs.php.net.

tl;dr
In my opinion:
Current bug tracker is terrible. Moving to a better/modern bug tracker
should be a high priority of the PHP community.

I'm presenting a PHP user/reporter point of view, I'm not much into
developing PHP interpreter itself. However often I have to use
bugs.php.net when debugging issues or checking security reports.

In the 1-10 scale I give bugs.php.net grade "2", meaning it's almost not usable.

Issues I have:
- the UI is terrible (not useful, confusing, misleading)
- it's really hard to find what person is looking for
- data quality is low (many duplicated reports, lot of old reports
cluttering the list, information gathered is not reliable)
- the tool blocks community in helping managing the issue list and triaging bugs
- Its not possible to log in, be notified when sth change on issues
I'm interested in (created, commented, voted or just watching)

Examples:
- Its not possible to link issues which are related/duplicated (when
you're not power user)
- its not possible to state PHP version or OS you're reproducing the issue in
- the search is not indexing comments (so the place where most
important information is stored)
- some actions like trying to edit an issue don't always return a
result/information/feedback to the user, and once they do it's not
helpful e.g. "The password you supplied was incorrect." -> what is the
password all about? where do I get it? how can I get it back once I
forgot?
- voting has some radio buttons selected by default, so I'm sure many
users just submits wrong data, because they just want to vote and
haven't check e.g. OS radio.
- I can't change the voting once it's done
- The "Same OS" stats are not really helpful, it doesn't even help to
know whether it's windows only issue or also linux related, it's not
really possible to filter issues related to some system
- there are still open issues for long not supported versions like 4
or 5, and you never know whether they are still valid because nobody
updates the affected versions. You need to go inside to see activity
and maybe you'll deduce sth from it.
- there are tons of stale issues even from over 10 years ago. With
better issue tracker people from community would be able to help
triaging these bugs, confirming them, setting correct statuses,
finding duplicates and so

There are of course many more, I haven't even started with UX ;)

To make the discussion constructive please answer following question
first, before we jump into details.
1. Do you agree that current issue tracker needs a change, or it's ok for you?
2. Do you consider that it's important and high priority to have a
better, more collaborative tool there?
3. As stated on twitter
(https://twitter.com/official_php/status/1024658601770668033 ) there
are some specific needs which make the move to different tool harder.
What are they?

Cheers
Tymoteusz