We're getting an influx of questions of people having problems that are best served by them reporting bugs. We should use the information for this question to allow us to close questions as bug reports (or add it as an option to an existing reason).
For bonus points it would be neat if we could paste in the URL to the bug number so that it could say "This question was closed by fluteflute as actually Bug #1" or whatever.
Here's an example.
There are a lot of reasons one might vote to close a post. We've actually scaled back on list of close reasons because it became to daunting for the average user to choose from a long, detailed list.
I would suggest closing bug reports as "Off Topic" (because that's what they are) and use the question-comments to provide the bug report URLs and to instruct the user as to the proper procedure for reporting bugs. That will quickly become part of the community routine (to close bug reports and add the comments) and soon everyone will be following suit.
The community can adopt whatever conventions you choose to help guide bug-report posts. When a post is closed as an off-topic bug report, you can add whatever you feel would be helpful to the top of the post. For example:
This question was closed by fluteflute as actually Bug #1.
Bug reports are off-topic for this forum. The Ubuntu Wiki has a very thorough guide on how to report bugs.
Thank you.
Every time you do that, you are leaving a "sign post" for everyone to see, instructing them how to proceed in the future. Soon it will become the community convention and everyone will be pitching in to keep the site clean and helping new users along the way.
There are hundreds of little conventions that have been adopted this way. You don't notice them because they just seem second nature once everyone starts following along.
Hmm... I like this idea a lot in theory, but we should be careful with it practice. I'm afraid of bouncing users around too much. The user is likely asking the question because they don't know if it is a bug or a problem with their own set up. We need to make it clear to them why it is a bug.
Also, closing the question shouldn't be the first reaction. Often times, there are existing work-arounds for known bugs. This information is valuable, and it should be included as an answer. This is especially true as stackexchange sites end up pretty high in Google searches.
I think there should probably be at least some minimal effort to see if the bug has aready been reported.
