Improvements in issue reporting

[TylerLeonhardt]

Hi all 👋

I just wanted to let you know about a couple of improvements we've made in issue reporting to help with the quality of issues that are opened.

The goal, was to minimize issues like this... which aren't very helpful, we know:

Use the issue reporter everywhere

First off, @DanTup helped us realize that these issues weren't created by our built-in Issue Reporter. They were created here:

which you can get to via >Developer: Show Running Extensions and it used some really old code that likely pre-dated the Issue Reporter...

So, with microsoft/vscode#159707 we no longer use this old logic and instead route users to the Issue Reporter. This should dramatically decrease the amount of "please paste" issues you see open on your repos.

Allow for larger "steps to reproduce" in the Issue Reporter

After discussions with GitHub, we've realized that our 2500 character limit on the URL opened by the issue reporter could be increased. We've increased this limit to 7500 in microsoft/vscode#159491. This should also decrease the number of "please paste" issues that you see.

There's still a lot more that can be done for issue reporting, but we hope that these little improvements will enable more quality issues for all of us 😃

[Spyder-0]

Very cool 👍

[bwateratmsft]

Related to the issue reporter, this is another improvement we'd love to see @TylerLeonhardt: microsoft/vscode#46726 and/or microsoft/vscode#148675

As an example, in the Docker extension we use an extension-supplied issue reporter, so that we can supply the call stack, error name, etc. in some reported issues. We'd really prefer to use the built-in issue reporter, though. However, we also see a lot of issues reported with no helpful user-provided information like repro steps; usually these issues are unactionable. Ideally, what we'd like is to include the stack and error info but still force users to type something into the Repro Steps field. If we put this extra info into the repro steps field, they are not required to enter anything--and usually don't.

[christian-bromann]

I never knew VS Code had an internal UI for reporting issues. I would love to see this more elevated, e.g. when doing a right click on the "Installed Extension" in the sidebar:

And maybe even on the extension main page:

[TylerLeonhardt]

This sounds good with microsoft/vscode#159786