Bug reports are a problem on the devforums. It’s become very common for Steps to Report a Bug to be linked in these threads, and it’s not the thread posters’ fault. Topics pinned to a certain category are almost invisible if someone uses Latest, rarely browsing by individual category. It’d be great to have better bug reports, but a pinned topic isn’t going to cut it. We’re going to keep getting new members, which is a good thing in its own right, but we’re going to keep having to educate them individually as they join for all eternity.
What we need is a topic template for bug reports. Essentially, when you create a topic, there is already pregenerated text in the body. Here is what I see when I create a new topic in Movies on the Discourse Sandbox for example:
In addition to ensuring bug reports are adequately detailed, this would provide those of us already providing adequate information with a nice format to follow, saving us from having to think about how to structure our post. Though, if someone would like to create a post from scratch, they can quickly and painlessly select the whole template with Ctrl+A or manually to remove it.
The template for bug reports could be something like:
Description of issue:
What should happen:
What happens when problem occurs:
The issue happens _____ often: (100% of the time? Randomly?)
Places bug occurs (games, site chat, etc):
Screenshots/videos:
Bug started happening: