Writing a good bug report

When searching for help online, it is useful to be able to write a good bug report. You will find that an answer is much more easily forthcoming if you can formulate the problem in a clear, reproducible way. This section will help you do just that.

The most difficult part of a bug report is actually defining the problem itself. It will help you to first think about what it is you are trying to accomplish. State your goal in a clear, concise manner as follows:

I need all requests to subdomain.example.com to be served from server1.

Avoid writing reports in the following manner:

I'm getting requests served from the local filesystem instead of proxying them to server1 when I call subdomain.example.com.

Do you see the difference between these two statements? In the first case, you can clearly see that there is a specific goal in mind. The second case describes more the result of the problem than the goal itself.

Once the problem has been defined, the next step is describing...