I can’t practically tell which bug report about Ubuntu gets comments most frequently. But the most-commented ones I’ve seen are controversial, not severe, and even they get a comment only every few hours. Combine that with the proportion of bug reporters who would be interested in chatting at all, and the chance that anyone else would be in a bug report’s IRC channel at the same time as you are is tiny.

I shall try again to explain why more bug reports isn’t always better. The more bug reports there are right now, the more likely the next one — no matter how well articulated —will be a duplicate that, for whatever reason, isn’t intercepted automatically. And the more likely it will be an edge case that, while unfortunate, isn’t important enough ever to come up as the thing that one of the existing developers should work on next. But the time required to triage that bug report is pretty much exactly the same as the time required to triage any other bug report. Therefore, after a point, bug reports have diminishing returns. If the number of developers and triagers (and the efficiency of the bug tracker) increases to keep pace with the number of bug reporters, this is fine. But except in the very geekiest projects, it does not.

Many Ubuntu applications already have a “Report a Problem” menu item that navigates to the correct Ubuntu package. I don’t know whether it also transmits other data (like dependency versions) appropriate to that package. Unfortunately, the menu item appears even in Ubuntu releases, not just in alphas and betas — while crashes, which could easily be tracked in a system that doesn’t require a Launchpad account or Web browser at all, are tracked *only* in alphas and betas. It is rather backwards. Also unfortunately, the menu item is AWOL from many applications, including Miro — though Miro has its own “Report a Bug” menu item going to its own bug tracker.