[SciPy-Dev] "Anonymous" bug reporting: useful?

[Robert Kern]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Andreas Hilboll <lists at hilboll.de> wrote:
> I was wondering if it would be good if users could report bugs without
> having to sign up for a Github account.  From a technical viewpoint,
> this should be possible, using a dedicated email account, some
> server-side scripting, and the Github API.
>
> Do you have any feeling for how many bugs do not get reported because a
> user doesn't want to go through the hassle of creating an account just
> to report a bug?
>
> I have the feeling that it must be as simple as possible to report bugs.
>  And having to create an account (be it at Github or by signing up for a
> mailing list) is an obstacle to that.
>
> Any thoughts / ideas?

I didn't realize that we had fixed all of the bugs that have already
been reported and our volunteers are pining away without any work to
do. ;-)

More seriously, the problem has always been spam. Removing filters to
lower the barrier for honest bug reports also removes the filters for
much more spam. There are always tradeoffs, and I think we've settled
on a reasonable one. If we were getting no bug reports, that would be
a problem, but we're getting a few every day. That's a healthy amount.

-- 
Robert Kern