I stumbled upon this thread already when the discussion came up in April, but I had not enough time back then for writing an answer. Since then, it occured to me that my mind went back to this discussion quite often, and now I found the time to write an answer
I’m a hobbyist developer and IT student, and I often notice bugs and problems in software I use. But when I report a bug, I want to do a detailed bug report, including some testing in which circumstances this bug occurs and in which not, maybe find out if the bug is reproducible, and this is, as you might guess, very time consuming.
Therefore I often just skip the bugs, and don’t report them, because I often lack of sparetime to do so. I even remember a bug in the WhatPulse-Client on my Macintosh Laptop several months ago, the client suspended the whole system in it’s startup several minutes, consuming 400% of CPU usage. After some research I found out that this bug was connected to mounting network shares, in fact, it only occured, when my Mac couldn’t connect to my samba shares (e.g. when I’m not at home). It froze exactly until the timeout was reached and the Finder prompted that it was unable to connect to , then it worked fine. I thought about reporting this bug, but didn’t know where, and needed my time for something else.
But getting a free premium membership in order for bugfixing on the beta releases could keep me motivated in reporting bugs as I find them Besides that only someone who has access to premium features could find bugs in them, so it is kind of neccessary to have access to all features if you wanted to do bug reporting. Furthermore, it would be nice to have some place for reporting the bugs, I think, a forum category should just do fine We could use these post icons to mark threads in fixed, unfixed, feature requests, etc. And it would be nice to see this forum being more active, I think (You should maybe create a dedicated side header for it, I think it is too hidden under the support-header, I needed to search for it and nearly thought it was gone :D) This could also push some users in here.
I’ll definitely follow this discussion to see where it goes, and if there was a beta testing / bug reporting program, I think I’d sign up