I just discovered that ALL bug reports are now handled through this public JIRA. As of 1.19.0.4 or perhaps earlier, the "Report Bug" menu item in the viewer directs users to the pjira. Without any further policy changes, this is a horrible burden on the JIRA community and severely hampers bug reporting by the general public. I propose that bug reports go to LL QA as before, and LL QA should filter the reports, test for reproducibility, and file issues in the JIRAs as appropriate. This JIRA is an inappropriate place to send the majority of users of SL who want to report a bug. JIRA takes time to learn, and is especially difficult for non-programmers to learn to use properly. As a result, we have a ridiculous number of duplicate issues, with more coming in every day. This is not a problem of lack of education; JIRA is just not a good tool for the average user to have to learn just to report their bugs. If users can't report their bug quickly, they won't report it at all, and bugs go unfound and unfixed. Worse yet, it seems like it has been left to us "good-citizens" of JIRA to clean up dupes, redirect support requests, bring important issues to LL's attention, reclassify, and generally manage the issues that are flowing in. Users get upset with us if we modify their issues, because they think we're somehow squelching their voice and not allowing LL to hear what they want to say. We're just trying to help make the JIRA into something actually useful, but in practice we're becoming the de facto voice for LL, and that's a horrible position to put us in, since we can only guess at LL's true policies with regard to most bugs. Bug triages are not processing issues fast enough to keep up with the flow. You can see from the following search that over 2300 bugs are unresloved, unassigned, and completely orphaned. http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&type=1&resolution=-1&assigneeSelect=unassigned&status=1&sorter/field=issuekey&sorter/order=DESC 35 of these bugs are mine, and most of those are legitimate, sometimes severe bugs that contain reproducible test cases, yet they've just sat for months. Not all bugs should be public. Users may not welcome public discussion on their bugs, and in some cases they may want to be able to provide private information to LL about how to reproduce the bug. Without becoming intricately familiar with this JIRA, they won't know that SEC is where you file exploits and that those issues aren't made public. It's not even clear after you've posted a SEC issue that you're the only non-Linden than can see it. In summary, LL has gone from being the clearinghouse for all bugs to essentially out-sourcing the sifting of bug reports to those of us who frequent the JIRA. I didn't know that all bug reports must go through this JIRA now, rather than just those made by people who want to make their bug public. That puts me in the uncomfortable position of seeming to many people unfamiliar with this JIRA as if I'm somehow a part of LL's QA team. It may seem, when I comment, as if I'm some kind of bug gatekeeper for all of SL. I don't want to be in that position, and I'm going to step back from this JIRA until this is sorted out. I request that LL come up with a simple, coherent process for handling bug reports. Users need to be able to quickly file bug reports without any programming experience and directly from the viewer. Requiring users to use the JIRA essentially filters out a large number of bugs from people who won't or can't learn how to use the JIRA, and that means bugs get lost. LL QA needs to step up to the plate and take back its job of filtering bug reports. QA should handle all reports in an internal queue as they did previously, and they should filter reports to ensure they're bugs (not support requests), cull duplicates, keep exploits private, and develop robust reproducible cases. Then, once a bug has been verified by LL QA, they should file an issue on their internal JIRA and a duplicate issue on the public JIRA. If more information is needed to verify a bug, they should request comments on the public JIRA. Advanced users should still be able to skip LL QA and directly file their bugs in this JIRA with fully reproducible test cases. This should NOT be a requirement, however. LL QA should directly monitor this JIRA for new issues, cutting out the bug triage meetings which currently cannot keep pace with the huge volume of issues. Remember, when users want to report bugs, they're doing so to help LL. It's important to take this information seriously and not let it fall through the cracks. I like the idea of having issues tracked publically on this JIRA, but it simply cannot be a replacement for the bug reporting/filtering step. This JIRA is in complete disarray because of the lack of a coherent set of policies on bugs, along with a low level of Linden involvement that leaves those of us who want to help out stranded and unsure of what LL wants done. I hope LL will adopt the policy I've outlined above and make this policy public, so everyone knows what's going on.