A useable but imperfect "beginner's guide to searching for previously reported bugs" has been added to the QA docs at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html Eli Goldberg has said that it is a bit below the standards of other QA documents, and he's right. It is too full of empty phrases. This is a document meant to be read by people who don't know that they want to read it when they start, so it can't be too terse and imperative, but I overdid it trying to keep away from that, and didn't set the tone I was aiming for. Suggestions for improving the prose or focus would be appreciated. Please keep in mind that this is a document for beginners who are not familiar with searching bugzilla, and it is meant to describe enough for them to feel comfortable doing worthwhile searches, not to impart expertise. Not much more should probably be added lest new contributors be more likely to brush it off as not being worth *their* time. Being honest, there is no way that every new contributor would bother even if they understood how instinctively. Nevertheless, this guide should be as engaging, inviting, and concise as possible to maximise its attractiveness. Thanks for any suggestions. A draft of a companion guide meant to help prescreeners and confirmers has been started: see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30978 "guide to screening duplicate bugs - rough draft" Potentially some of the search techniques described there could be rewritten as an addendum to the beginner's guide, for those who want to learn more but aren't ready to try evaluating others' bugs.

A revised version, retitled "how to find previously reported bugs", http://www.albedo.net/~sidr/mozilla/docs/finding-duplicate-bugs.draft-06.html , is with any luck an improvement on the original. Comments by Eli Goldberg guided some attention to clear expression, which had unfortunately been slighted in favour of attention to content previously.

Please put these docs in a more prominent place. I'd suggest adding another link somewhere on the main bugzilla page. It could be titled "Help finding duplicates" or whatever. If that's not possible, add a reference on the "most frequent bugs" page. You won't believe the way I found them after having fun with bugzilla for several weeks now, and I still don't know what's the ``official'' path to reach them...

I see Gerv has added a link to it on <http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/>, which should become a much more prominent resource.

At long last, here is the completely rewritten and reorganized tutorial for finding previously reported bugs. It should be a real improvement on the original. The tutorial is now called "how to find previously reported bugs" and has a filename of finding-duplicate-bugs.html -- the former is "correct", the latter is the vernacular, but neither "how to find duplicate bugs" nor finding-previously-reported-bugs.html satisfies, so, failing a brainwave, I think we'll have to live with the mismatch. Ideally this tutorial would appear at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/finding-duplicate-bugs.html and, to be kind to anywone who might have bookmarked http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html the same file would be copied to the latter URL as well. Gerv, I'd suggest changing the link text on http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/ from "How to search for duplicates" to "How to find out if a bug has been previously reported" to distinguish it from the new "How to screen out duplicate bug reports" tutorial (bug 30978). If you can find anything to tweak or polish, please go ahead, but you may as well put this update in place immediately -- it's a marked improvement on the original as it is.

Checked in as beginning-duplicate-finding.html; because mozilla.org doesn't allow links to go dead, you need a fairly good reason for changing a filename (as, if you change them too often, you then end up with loads of similarly-named files, most of which are redirects). The name is close enough ;-) There'll be description text on /quality/help/ which makes it clear. Oh, and I corrected the spelling of Christine's name ;-) Gerv

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