I’m wondering: who is this instruction mainly directed at? Since you posted it in the topic itself, I assume it’s meant for the participants of the discussion. But how is this supposed to be handled in practice?
In many cases, when someone opens a topic due to a problem they’re experiencing, it’s not immediately clear to them whether a third-party plugin, theme, or component is involved. That often only becomes apparent as the discussion progresses. At that point, most of us can’t move posts into the dedicated topic — so your idea of how this should be handled must be different.
Do you expect users to already know the cause of their issue before posting? I agree that starting a topic in Support instead of Bug could make sense if you’re unsure, but since you didn’t move this one to Support either, that doesn’t seem to be what you’re suggesting.
I’m trying to understand what we as regular participants should have done differently here.
I think in this case it was right to post it to Bug because the cause was not known at first. Then it should have been merged into the theme component topic. Until then I think it could have stayed in Bug, perhaps with a tag indicating that a component was the culprit?
I’m not fond of the General category which has become a catchall for all manner of topics. I can see a world where people post to General because they don’t know where it belongs but moderators move those posts to the appropriate place if it exists already or perhaps create a new category if enough similar topics are landing in General.
Sam, feel free to use the flag too if you are feeling lazy in cases like these. Then moderators can take care of it.
This makes me think that a new #3rd-party tag could be created and used, similar to how we use unsupported-install. For example, in the case of Dashboard New Posts statistics broken, there’s much to learn about debugging Discourse in general, but only a small part of the conversation is about the specific plugin causing the issue. I don’t think it would be ideal to move the entire conversation into the plugin’s topic, as this isn’t the place where I would look for examples on how to narrow down problems.
Therefore, I think keeping it in its own topic with a #3rd-party tag would make more sense. It might be better to place this in the support category rather than the bug category. That way, users can select a solution, and the topic will automatically close. In the bug category, a staff member would have to manually close it.
So, a topic could be created, replies would contain the steps to identify the cause. The post identifying it selected as the solution, the topic would be tagged with #3rd-party, and moved to another category if needed. Then the OP could notify the plugin/theme/component author by posting in the dedicated plugin/theme/component topic if they don’t already know. Though maybe even in that case, a post in the topic would be helpful for others having the same issue.