GA, of course I understand the frustrations. And I really appreciate those (like you) going over them and helping to fix the problms.

Look, I wasn't in the Maemo SW team the day it was decided to setup a public bug tracker without having a process and resources to handle the feedback properly. I won't blame who did that either, because probably had not many other choices.

After many discussions and attempts, at the beginning of the year we got the budget to start breaking the wall by hiring a good external bugmaster. He landed when OS2008 was well cooked and served, with the kitchen preparing for Fremantle.

Since then a bugsquad team has been created and all the new feedback gets reviewed by many eyes inside Maemo SW and in the community thanks to bug jars and weekly internal reports including cloned bugs in the internal bugzilla. Also the hundreds of open bugs/requests get slowly reviewed thanks to their votes, priorities and slow but systematic scanning component by component.

Is this enough? Of course not. To me actually this is good training for Fremantle, and it's even probable that fedback handling in Fremantle won't be still good enough but it will be good training for Harmattan - which should bring The Right Thing without excuses.

Part of the right thing is to handle feature requests with the commitment of product managers and supported by a process making them follow the feedback when planning roadmaps. The lack of process and commitment was the original sin made with bugs.maemo.org and is what we need to avoid when giving birth to a potential Maemo Brainstorm. fyi I'm working with them anyway to get them in the loop through a Feature Jar and the current features in the bugzilla.

In the meantime, we focus our attention is what is new (to cut the trend you mention about new feedback not reviewed in months) and what is relevant.

For the later, votes are essential and just this fact should be incentive enough for people to vote (imho). However, why not karma for voting? People have 20 active votes max so there is no easy way to abuse that in a really harmful way. If people "abuse" the system by rising just any irrelevant bug two things might happen:

- The abuse is so spread in many bugs that it doesn't cause any effect on e.g. bug jars.

- The abuse causes irrelevant bugs to appear on the top, but because they are visibly irrelevant they get a quick resolution in any way, getting off the list.