For the open source software I made contributions to, I chose Blender because there is a bug/issue report on their website where users report issues and how to replicate them. Blender is an open source software where you can create objects/models for games, animations, and other mediums. Many creators use it for their projects, as there is a quite the versatility in what it can do. What I do is try and do all the steps to replicate the issue the initial poster brings up to see if it exists. If it does, then I report the problem and then it’ll hopefully get fixed in a new version of Blender or the developers behind it patch the issues out. Repeating the process for some of the issues are relatively easy enough, and are generally easily reportable on Blenders forums. One particular issue I started with was an issue regarding using an image as a texture. If you used an image for the object's texture in Blender, saved the object, but then deleted the image from your device, it would render the object as purple. According to the person who reported the issue, that was something that wasn’t supposed to happen in newer versions of Blender. There was also another issue where if a user tried to undo a certain action, it would undo every single action done to the model. While redo the undo and then undoing that afterwards seems to fix the issue, having all the work undone when trying to undo a specific action is an error that needs fixing.
The community itself seems to be relatively lax as far as forums go. There’s nothing really “bad” or “toxic” that could be pointed out as a bad experience. However, there isn’t really much reward or talk about the issues. Once the issue is sorted out, the post about the problem is closed by the moderators of the forum until someone brings up a new topic related to the subject. It’s simple but effective as a bug/issue reporting process goes is how I feel.
I feel like reporting/fixing the issues is rewarding, because I help make the software better for other users. By making it better, users will have an easier time using it for their projects. But the challenge of not having the exact system requirements down when trying to repeat the steps that produced the issue makes me wonder if I’m properly helping. I guess I can help on making it more welcoming by being more active on the forums.
Here's some of the the issues I had a hand in helping with.