149912 - "how to find previously reported bugs" tutorial is hard to find

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Anthony Bailey]

As a brand new user of 1.0, I submitted 149684, one of many duplicate reports of
128322. I took half an hour or so to read documentation before submitting the
bug, but messed up anyway.

Having gone back and looked at what happened, I can see that I didn't find the
advice that "if you're using a milestone build, you should add RESOLVED and
maybe VERIFIED" states when querying for duplicates, and hence didn't find any
of them.

The link to the tutorial on searching for duplicates that contains this vital
information, 
<http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html>, is
rather buried in the middle of the bug-writing-guidelines. I instead followed
one of the many prominent links to the Bugzilla Helper, which just searched for
the default NEW, ASSIGNED and REOPENED states. Hence a subsequent duplicate
submission and "Please read the bug reporting guidelines in future." admonishment.

Now, I may just be looking to justify a stupid mistake I made. (c:

But perhaps what I did is not untypical and the documentation could be improved
to make it less likely.

The tutorial or this specific piece of advice could be made more prominent
earlier in the bug submitting pages.

But perhaps it would be even better to have the helper notice when the version
is a milestone build, and search more appropriately? It seems there will be a
lot more reports from new milestone build users now that 1.0 is out.

Comment 1

[Will Budreau]

The help text at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/queryhelp.cgi#status could include
this information, as it's linked directly from the STATUS list.

Comment 2

[Daniel Wang]

-> Asa

Comment 3

[Daniel Wang]

beginning-duplicate-finding.html link added to /quality/index.html
meta link added to /quality/bug-writing-guidelines.html

Comment 4

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

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