You can always ping a mod and request they make one. Using offsite communication for moderation is an avenue for abuse and we strongly discourage it.

Moderators should not feel it necessary to communicate with users outside the platform. And, in fact, we discourage it for moderation purposes entirely. That's why we have private chat rooms.

@RandomPerson we don't. The mods do.

@cocomac There's generally only one time the latter is the case - the first election after leaving beta. This site has been out of beta for many years. You can also tell by looking at the number of slots that we're filling on the election page.

That's not information we share unless the moderators themselves are opting to announce it in advance.

@Zanna Yeah, the rewording in the close modal could be really valuable - something like "Use this close reason on questions that are attempting to report a bug. Do not use it on questions that are caused by bugs. Those questions should be answered with guidance on how to work around the bug unless they're duplicates of an existing question." Or something like that. :)

Thanks for doing that check, @Dan - it's really helpful. And thanks. :)

As to the validity of the close reason - I did read through your discussion and I think you make really good points - I think that helping people work around a bug is more useful than telling them "go report the bug". Answers could be anything from "this seems to be a bug but here's a workaround that should get you what you need" or "unfortunately, this is a bug that's existed for a while and has been reported already. Here's a duplicate that shows some options to avoid this problem."... etc.

@Zanna This is probably a place where I'm not sure about the fine points - which is understandable and why I'm getting feedback. :) I was under the impression that Launchpad was for only official Ubuntu releases - if that's not correct and all of the flavors have places to receive bug reports there, then that makes sense. The other thing is if I just say "should be reported" people might look for a place here on AU to do that reporting - which would be confusing to people - so either something like "to Ubuntu" or something like that seems important if we're not linking anywhere.

Regarding the links, @BeastOfCaerbannog the other option is that I can update the other fields to remove them or link to a different place so that they aren't linked twice. I actually looked around for discussions here on meta about some of these topics but I couldn't find anything. The meta discussion/decision is often a good target for more information - if y'all do have that, I can use those in one place or the other.