"ubuntu+1" is the developmental release of Ubuntu, so it changes every day so it can cause people to have lots of problems and ask for help. So for example people asking 11.04 (aka natty) questions months before the release, etc.
I think a bunch of us agreed in chat on how we handle these kind questions but we never actually posted here.
Since it would be a waste of time cleaning up most of this stuff since it's too localized here are my proposals.
Questions about features coming up in the release. This should be encouraged, as it's useful for users who might not know how to find information on the upcoming features (especially around the time of UDS) - however we need to be diligent as to not get swamped with hand-wavy faux questions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9890/will-unity-be-more-customizable is an example of a question that is unanswerable.
If the question is a general one on how to test: How do I upgrade to the development release (aka. Ubuntu+1)?
If the question is general enough to teach people how to use the developmental release then that would be fine, but most of them could probably be duped to this: There's an issue with an Alpha/Beta Release of Ubuntu, what should I do?
Almost all Natty threads I've seen so far fell into one of these categories:
I despise speculative threads. Not only can I not answer them but often only the person driving the project can. I don't really see a difference between this and a feature request, even if the question is levelled directly against the whole distribution.
These should live on Brainstorm or Launchpad, filed under the specific project. If we can get people into that mentality, they'll see the current feature requests and targets before they ask, saving people triage time. That's the point of doing all this in the open, right?
I'm all for shooting these threads down as off-topic the instant they appear but I've seen enough of bug trackers to know that just hiding the issue just means the next person will ask... Repeating this process and expecting people to figure it out is, I believe, the very definition of insanity.
As a compromise, perhaps just keeping one master thread for each topic and being a lot more diligent getting things marked as duplicates. At the moment a sub-3k user might comment that it's a dupe but that doesn't stop five people piling in with duplicate answers.
We're not a bug tracker. To try and be one is hugely unfair on the developers. We need to push people to Launchpad (and upstream where applicable) so that proper bugs are filed.
Similar logic applies though. If we close down a popular bug topic that affects a lot of natty users, we'll just spawn dozens of duplicates.
Of course to help people we need to push people to the right place. Instead of just punching them off to Launchpad we send them to the exact bug (and then close as off-topic).
I'm warmer to these as they usually have lasting value but they're just as prone to duplicates as other hot topics.
There's also a technical protectionism argument to make. If a user has to ask how to upgrade (and the upgrades function as documented), they've already demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to help themselves. On pre-release software the will and skill to Google your way out of an issue is as important as knowing how to file a bug.
I know we're not doctors or lawyers but I feel we should show some professionalism and part of that is knowing when not to give advice.
In addition to the above considerations, I would suggest allowing ubutnu +1 as on topic with some concrete milestone, with the release of the RC or beta 2 ?
Sort of depends on when, in general, ubuntu +1 is both stable enough and in use enough such that closing all the threads becomes too burdensome and / or appears unwelcoming.
