The moderator did the right thing. The Bug Reporting Hub category is for reporting bugs, not for making comments on the general situation about bugs. The appropriate place for this conversation is General Discussion.
The overall process is, a Community Manager logs a bug. That bug report gets tagged with feedback-logged , and it goes to someone in QA. From there, QA tries to reproduce the bug. Everybody know that “REPRODUCTION STEPS” section? That’s where they read people’s, “Just fly the plane” step to reproduce and probably get really frustrated that there isn’t more information. (As much information as possible needs to be given in this step.) If they are able to reproduce the issue, they will create a bug report in their system. At this point, a Community Manager will either close them out as “no repro” or tag them bug-logged. If they tag them bug-logged, then a reproduction of the bug report has been successful.
That being said, I agree with your premise. There are several problems:
- There is no guarantee that any given bug report will even get feedback-logged. There are literally thousands of bug reports that will never be seen by anyone. The Community team has many responsibilities, of which logging bugs is just one of many. I don’t see a way that they could possibly follow through with all the bugs that come through the forums. My recommendation is that people log bugs on Zendesk, where someone will look at them. Zendesk has improved over the years, and at a minimum, someone will look at what you send them there. Be respectful, give copious amounts of information on how to reproduce a bug. (Don’t assume that the person reading your bug report will figure this out. They go through dozens of bug reports every day. The more you can get to the level of, “flip this switch then turn this setting from automatic to manual” or whatever the steps are, the easier it will be on them.)
- The process from going to feedback-logged to bug-logged is manual. There are tons of #feedback-logged bug reports that are 2+ years old, and it’s not clear to me if anyone is monitoring them.
- Even if something is bug-logged, the process is opaque from there. There is a triage process that happens. Bugs for things like first-party Carenado planes goes to Carenado and scenery bugs go to the world team. But we don’t know what happens. And even very legitimate bugs get lost in the mix. Bugs get assigned out to people, but what happens after that is only known to a few people. I do not think it is appropriate for the public to know who got assigned a bug. I think that sets people up to find those developers’ social media accounts and pester them to get their personal cause fixed, and that’s completely inappropriate. But having an ETA for certain bugs would be so helpful. Unfortunately, the system as it is right now is not setup for that kind of thing.
- I’ve said this many times before, bug sometimes, legitimate bug reports just get closed as “won’t fix” without reason. Here is a list of about 100 bugs like that; I’m sure that there are more. You know gigantic hangars? It’s closed as “Won’t fix.” The fact that the drone camera tends to roll slightly and for no apparent reason? It’s also closed as “Won’t fix.” To this date, the team has not given a reason for these types of closures, and I doubt that we will ever have an answer.