Closed communities make slow work!
Guess I will have to wait.
Why have a closed bug hunters forum? Why no open it?
Stuart, you know as well as anyone that the active community is small compared to the installed base. You also know that the closed forum is for the volunteer and Zentyal staff, so for a fraction of the small active community. Since I have access to that forum, I can tell you that there is very little going on in the closed forum. The last post is from August 25 or something like that.
Since the developers accept and act on bug reports from the community, since they accept patches, and since they are active in the beta forum, I think you are making the community sound more closed than it is. That's unjust and uncharitable from any point of view, it seems to me. The Zentyal community is imperfect, but until those imperfections are true impediments to Zentyal as a product, we have room and time to grow as a community--again, so it seems to me.
Finally, quoting chapter and verse to point out the community's shortcomings is something that is of dubious value. Most of us are ordinary people with much more to do than things Zentyal. That is part of the chaos of the bazaar and is why open source is judged on the long haul, not the short haul. If Zentyal was still like eBox 1, we would have real reason to be concerned. But with each new release the product improves, even if incrementally. So to me, charitable participation in the Zentyal community means spending significant time giving credit where credit is due (and the karma feature of the software is almost useless for that purpose, it seems to me, since it can quickly devolve into interpersonal back-biting) while promoting community growth in constructive, non-ivory-tower ways.
In short, a
negative nancy constructively contributes less to the community that she thinks she does. In any case, moderators are tasked with moderating (as in protecting equity and fairness) the overall tone of the community conversation. Obviously, the tone should be demonstrably constructive even when critical. Opening the closed bug hunt forum will accomplish nothing of practical value so I see no need to argue for it (or against it) further at this time.