On 5/5/06, Jason Stewart <<a href="mailto:jason.e.stewart@gmail.com">jason.e.stewart@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I don't know the answers, so these are just rhetorical questions. But my gut instinct is to simply ask people to file a new bug, and let the QA team sort it out. If a knowledgeable person is posting a bug s/he will *already* know to check for duplicates and so you don't have to tell them. </blockquote></div> I used to work with support operations some time ago, and right now I'm implementing a help desk infrastructure for my company. There are industry standard practices for help desk operations available now, for example, the extensive ITIL library (sic). I'm not sure about which one is the "recommended practice", but most companies I checked will ask for the user to register a complaint (open a ticket, or file a bug); and the support crew will try to identify it and find a duplicate. Of course, we are talking here about a scenario where the user is hardly familiar with the process of checking a bug database; knowledgeable users can certainly do more in this regard. As Ubuntu goes more and more "to the masses", using something like ITIL's documented practices may turn out to be a step worth taking. ITIL is not (just) about "buzzword compliance", there are some good ideas in terms of practices and procedures there, and I think it should definitely be checked. -- Carlos Ribeiro Consultoria em Projetos blog: <a href="http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com">http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com</a> blog: <a href="http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com">http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com </a> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@gmail.com">carribeiro@gmail.com</a> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@yahoo.com">carribeiro@yahoo.com</a>