Most of the bugs that get reported to the PHP project are pretty useful. They help developers track down those small, random issues that might slip through the cracks otherwise. There are, however, some of them that make you wonder a bit about the person that submitted them Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in a new blog post.
Recently the PHP project has been receiving an increasing number of rather silly reports, these vary from simply not reading the manual, searching the internet or a fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works.
He points out three in particular (from the same person, no less) about things that shown an almost complete lack of understand of what PHP does. One was a request to make PHP use less CPU and another asking to make PHP censorship free and, finally, a request to make PHP more secure...by doing away with support for cookies.
Scott also suggests a few constructive things you can do before submitting a good (useful) bug report:
- Gather together as much relevant information as you can (generalizations are bad)
- Run performance checks against older PHP versions to try to pin down when the bug was added
- And, finally: "don't get aggressive or be an asshole when your bug reports get closed".