Andrew,
Maybe you should add a bit of text to the top of the forums header: “Please Submit Bug Reports/Feature Requests to GitHub,” because let’s face it, somewhere between few and no one appear to read your FAQs.
Might save you some future typing/thread closings. 
I was referring to this site, Ben, and the fact that Andrew is constantly having to tell people to post bugs on GitHub and close threads.
We already have such a post pinned on each category: e.g. Rules for VCV Rack category
If people can’t read a pinned post, there’s not much else this forum software can offer that will make them read. Feel free to look around https://meta.discourse.org/ for third-party plugins though. Perhaps there’s one that displays some sort of message on the “preview” panel on the right of the text box I’m typing this in.
FAQs are, literally, devices made by service staff to avoid talking to people. They serve at the pleasure of those service staff and not the people being serviced.
Human nature is to share with you the story of there being bears in the woods. It is not in human nature to first look for plaques detailing the correct time of day, mood and how many Form 21C’s to fill out before warning of you of the bear in the woods. This is why people who create circuitous mazes to accept information either 1) lose it entirely or 2) hire a secretary that deals with the human element, then turns around and puts it in whatever file drawer it goes in.
IT people especially like to think that an article database, manuals, social media website, forums, e-mail etc are all coherent. They are not. Amazon’s patenting and use of “1-click buying” and the evidence behind such as increasing sales because even a single button press can represent a significant wall of resistance to user interaction should be telling. The constant whines of IT staff complaining that people talk to them directly instead of filing reports in to a nameless ticket system at their day job should also be telling.
As a person my job is not to find whatever circuitous route you establish for yourself to accept information. My job is not even to give it to you in the first place. I do so because I cared hard enough to think you should know. As a continued thought, when you order a package the mail man does not also file receipts in your ERP system (as much as you might like) and put it on the correct storage bay in the right warehouse. He just hands you the package, maybe has you sign for it and leaves. Consider that for a moment.
It does not take significantly more time to copy and paste the reports in to whatever filing system a developer wishes to have them in (this is what I do, and it avoids pissing on both human nature or making the reporter feel insulted) than it does to simply delete them. And closing them is further rude and incorrect, because it prevents users from being able to discuss workarounds or if the bug was even a bug in the first place. Consider that developers such as Bethesda who burn threads criticising bugs are seen with disdain. That is only one developer, but the practice of thread burning with a copypasta is typically seen as hostile.
A banner might help, but the combination of diaspora and hostile responses thereof are just… wrong.
I disagree, I like reading FAQs, since they’re designed to answer the most common questions that I might have about a project, so they’re very efficient reading.
For now, moderators should continue closing threads that turn into feature requests and bug reports, with a message pointing to the Rack FAQ. Most users will eventually get the idea.
If I work really hard in 2019, I might have enough funds to hire a public relations employee/contrator, who would be fantastic for giving VCV customers the feeling that their needs can be satisfied without spending much time looking through forums. But I don’t have those funds now, so I need to time-manage myself, with the help of the community, in order to give a mostly good community experience to VCV Rack users. So although it might seem unrelated, buying VCV plugins will directly improve VCV Rack customer support.
Well … didn’t mean to cause a ruckus. Carry on and keep calm.
Adding Github Issues isn’t a Form 21C. It’s the right place to log bugs and feature requests. And on github, @Vortico is very responsive. More responsive than I would be in his position.
maybe we can have a middle-of-the-road solution? something like:
bug reports and feature requests posted in the community forums or on facebook will be ignored by the developers, but users are free to discuss them, after which a volunteer may open a github issue.
thoughts?
Sounds reasonable. I’m gone from the Facebook group and this forum (other than #development) for at least a month and possibly permanently, so it will effectively be that way—unenforced.
that’s about exact to what i proposed couple of days ago, only then with it’s own forum category to keep it manageable.
but it was deemed unnecessary.
