Stupid Bug Reports

Recently the PHP project has been receiving an increasing number of rather silly reports, these vary from simply not reading the manual, searching the internet or a fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works.

In December there were several reports but two that jumped out were simply leagues of stupidity above the rest:

Firstly we received a feature request to "Make PHP use less CPU". The proposal was that we should take out our magical wands tap the PHP source code and make it so that a single server could handle millions of visitors of a day. The use case was that we could make Wikipedia run from a single machine....

Unfortunately other users decided to feed the troll here and start giving him suggestions to improve PHP performance.

The second was yet another feature request to make PHP censorship free, the reporter proposed an option to make PHP be unblockable by ISPs. I didn't even know where to start with this request...

Skip forward to January and we got another one of these requests, this time titled "Make PHP more secure". Seemed like a reasonable request until you read the report, the suggestion was to remove the ability to set permanent cookies because this was a security hole.

For those paying attention and went off to read the reports you'll notice that the same person reported these and I'm not particularly picking on this one reporter, it just so happens that they're the most clueless in the past two months.

When you make a bug report or feature request to any sort of project please check you have all of the relevant information and if you can get someone else to check it through. Try searching Google first or ask in a mailing list.

For a performance issue check against an older version of PHP to see if you can work out when it was introduced, if you're not currently testing the CVS version then check that as well. It may have been fixed already. Reports that language X is faster than PHP will also most likely be ignored, these really aren't constructive and unless you can identify the issue within PHP it's pointless to create a report.

Finally, don't get aggressive or be an asshole when your bug reports get closed. PHP is an open source project and most contributors are volunteers. If you don't like something then you are more than welcome to submit a patch.

Comments

[Chucho]

Damn web designers xD

[fa]

The first one clearly beats my current favourite, http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=44831

[Keisial]

"For example, wikipedia uses PHP, but
because of the millions of users that visit it every month it needs 10
or 20 servers. (...) so only need 1
dedicated server."

If he can drive Wikipedia with just 20 servers, he has done enough magic.

Wikipedia uses hundreds of servers.
http://leuksman.com/log/2009/02/12/your-donations-at-work-new-servers-for-wikipedia/ says it uses 156 Apache web servers (plus db, caching servers...).

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PHP is one of the most flexible languages I think. Most of the people just lack a little patience while developing their apps and lack the code optimization knowledge, that's why these kinds of requests appear at all.

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It may have been fixed already. Reports that language X is faster than PHP will also most likely be ignored, these really aren't constructive and unless you can identify the issue within PHP it's pointless to create a report.

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