Should we make more verbose that bugs and bug related stuff are OT on Ask ubuntu?

Question

I've seen couple times now people asking for "confirmation" of a bug (which to top it off, it's already confirmed and reproducible) and even they provide with the links of the bug report. And this question Is it okay to ask for confirmation of a suspected bug? made me wonder "what is happening here? why people are bringing bugs to AU?". While I believe that non-workaround solution to bugs, like this one where (after edits) instead of asking how to fix the bug, asked how to just drop the buggy part of the application (is a corner case scenario, but is a recent example) could be considered on topic (again, corner case scenario), but questions about a specific bug should be considered off topic.

Our help page doesn't specify what is the policy about "already reported, or suspected bugs" (nor the close reasons) so maybe we should expand the description to include such cases. I'm in blank right now, so I can't propose a draft about what the help page should say.

Answer 1

I generally agree. That Mir/Surfaceflinger question was awful before it was edited but there was a valid way of asking roughly the same question to get roughly the same answers that was on-topic.

When we can do that, I say we do that. That's more valuable to everybody and there is an argument that quite a lot of our questions are just reflections of bugs and other undocumented features.

But when people are just Hodoring around asking for confirmation, I'd be tempted to just dupe against the how to report a bug (commit "5121" to memory or write it on a post-it). The bug system has a lovely duplicate detection system (and a lot of pople who know how to dupe things manually).