Forum organization suggestion

When I first saw the "Help and Bug Reports" forum I thought "What a great idea, combining the two!". Now I've changed my mind, and would prefer to see them be separate forums.

The reason I liked the idea was that either a reported problem is indeed a bug, or it is a user issue that is resolvable. It removed the necessity to disambiguate between these two possibilities in advance of posting.

Now I no longer like the idea, because it seems to me that it leads to every bug reported being somehow reframed as a call for help, and not taken as a reported issue, as the poster intended. Telling the poster "you can solve the problem this or that way" is good, as long as there is an acknowledgement that something IS wrong, or the poster would not be needing help in the first place. But presently I don't feel that there is such a recognition. Help is abundant, yes, and I do appreciate it; but help can be excessive if it comes at the price of genuine issues being dismissed as "having been solved". It is definitely bluntly excessive when the poster is clearly reporting a bug and not asking for help.

An issue is not solved until it is solved at the code level, or at the data file level, or at the interface level. Helping a user resolve an immediate problem should not be confused with resolution.

(Furthermore, saying to someone who is getting frustrated, "you are getting this for free, so pipe down, boy", however politely, is NOT kosher; it violates the open source spirit. I have done, and continue to do, a lot of things for free, so I will not accept second class citizenship on the basis of not (yet) being a paying customer.)

All this may just be my perception; but perceptions are important; and me being Mr Average, chances are many other people end up feeling the same way, and after trying to report bugs a dozen times and ONLY getting "help" as a result, they probably just give up and leave this forum for good.

Admittedly, though, this is a lot my own fault, for not reading the manual. At least officially this is blame-worthy; but then again, the era of reading manuals is long past. Nobody has the time, anymore, --and I will probably never read it. It's not a decision; it is a forecast made from statistical observation: Last time I read an application's manual must have been back in the 90's. But so, even when a bug report is a "user error", then it is still a bug report, just of a different kind: It is a bug report about lack of clarity in the user interface; lack of proper popup mouse-over help, too many entries under a given heading or menu, etceteras. The new standard for software is that it should be easy to find/discover things.

But I'm getting off a tangent. I think the point is made, though. There's a problem with bug reporting and help getting mixed up in a less than fully healthy way; or there is at least the problem of it being perceivable to be so.

Now, please refrain from helping me on this one...