Re: Bugsnet

Hi Joe, I don't think anybody denies that bugsnet isn't great, and that spam is an issue. I would argue that the main reason for the spam is, is that we don't require a sign-up. But I think we need to be really careful if we'd decide to move to something else. TLDR: I don't believe GitHub issues is suitable, neither feature wise or future-safety wise. We need to be sensible about both items if we decided to move to a different issue tracker. Right now, bugs has several features that GitHub issues doesn't provide: multiple statusses, categories (of which bugsnet has a *lot*), and dedicated fields for the PHP version etc. I know that the PHP version can be done through a issue template, and that the categories can be done with labels. But in order to represent the same rich category information, and hence be able to search on bugs in a specific category (such as "DateTime", you'd need a label each for each current category. Having to maintain these labels, and setting them correctly on issues, is perhaps going to be more work than removing spam. I'm sure we can make it work *somewhat*, but it is going to be a degradation of what bugsnet does. On top of that, we'll have to install/configure build automation, such as our "quick closes", or the "closed after 3 weeks of inactivity". And I think somebody else mentioned this already, but I am going to expect that people will use the issue tracker for support questions as well. It has been the case for every GH repository that I had issues enabled on. The other important issue is to consider the continuation of the availability of the platform. Bugsnet has been running for 23 years. While that unfortunately means that some of the code is that old, it is IMO a stellar track record. Is GitHub Issues going to be around in a way that we want it in another 23 years? And, if GHI is going a way we don't want it to go in in say 5 years, is it possible to switch easily to something else? This isn't really a problem with the code repository itself, as it's easy enough to clone and move somewhere else. But that is *not* the case for GHI. AFAIK, you can't either import or export easily into/out of it, and most definitely not in the rich format that we currently have in bugsnet. I did actually experiment with GitHub Issues for Xdebug, and decided that even for that small a project, it wasn't really suitable due to the feature set, and that's basically just *me* using it. I currently use Mantis, which although it has it's minor issues, works actually really well. I can host it myself, although they can provide a hosted service, and it's actively maintained, and written in PHP. cheers, Derick -- PHP 7.4 Release Manager Host of PHP Internals News: https://phpinternals.news Like Xdebug? Consider supporting me: https://xdebug.org/support https://derickrethans.nl | https://xdebug.org | https://dram.io twitter: @derickr and @xdebug