There’s a reason that we call our bug tracking software “todo”: it designed to track things that need to be done. It’s not designed for end-user support, handling feature requests, and so on. This is a departure from the approach of some other popular forges.
We use our bug trackers for confirmed bugs and confirmed feature requests only. Due to learned behaviors from other platforms, many users do not understand this. For this reason, many project admins actually go so far as to set up read-only trackers, so that only maintainers can file tickets. This approach improves the quality of bug reports and sharply reduces duplicates, turning the tracker into a narrowly-focused tool for organizing the work of the contributors.
But what happens to end-users in this arrangement? They’re not forgotten: they are given a better venue for their problems. Most projects of this sort provide a foo-users or foo-discuss mailing list, which encourages submissions from end-users in a more forum-oriented style. Sometimes these discussions become actionable, in which case a ticket is filed by a maintainer or a janitor (the latter opening up a new contributor role for non-programmers), but more often than not the user just has to have a few questions answered. Often the answers come from other users, saving the maintainers time and encouraging a community of mutual support to develop.
Many projects also set up an IRC channel for short questions, discussions, and hands-on troubleshooting in a real-time format. Many of the discussions on IRC can also result in tickets, or help collect information to start a good mailing list thread, and provide another role still for non-programming contributors to help others out. We’ll soon be offering tools on sourcehut to help you maintain your project’s IRC channel.
In addition to this -users mailing list, most projects have a -devel mailing list for development discussions and patch reviews, and often a developer IRC channel as well. This segregation of development resources and end-user support resources helps developers stay focused and on-topic in their work, without interruption, and provides a better places for end-users to get help.