In a session at UDS about increasing the use of Apport we agreed to run a series of experiments in Launchpad to encourage people to use Apport (via ubuntu-bug and ‘Report a Problem’) to report all bugs in Ubuntu. As others have pointed out, this is key to improving the quality of bug reports and in turn reduce the time to process them.
The first experiment, starting this week, is to change the ‘Report a bug’ link to lead to the ReportingBugs page on help.ubuntu.com instead of a +filebug page on Launchpad. To gauge the success of these experiments we’ll look at the number of bugs filed, the proportion filed using Apport and the google ranking of the ReportingBugs page.
The +filebug page still exists and can be used for some classes of bugs (like reporting lack of networking from a different machine). The change will be made for the Ubuntu distribution only and will not affect the bug reporting links from other project pages in Launchpad.