I’ve migrated my previous bug tracker (a Trac installation) to GitHub’s issues. Why? Due to spam.

First things first: what does that mean for my users?

• Due to technical reasons I had to delete my GitHub repository and create a new, private one for the migration which has been made public again afterwards under the usual name, »mkvtoolnix«. This means that all the subscriptions, stars and existing pull requests (both closed and open) have been lost. I’m sorry for this, and if you still want to receive notifications then please just re-subscribe to the repository.
• The user information from Trac couldn’t be kept. This means that all the GitHub issues have myself as the author. The original author is still mentioned in each comment as »originally posted by …«, though.
• Due to the point above the notifications won’t work for migrated issues (meaning that if you had a bug open on Trac then you will need to re-subscribe to the corresponding issue on GitHub in order to receive notifications). Newly created issues on GitHub will automatically have their author subscribed to them, of course.
• You will need an account on GitHub if you want to post a bug. Overall this is a good change: it’s free, it’s easy, GitHub offers two-factor authentication (and is therefore a lot more secure than a standard Trac installation), and a lot of people already have GitHub accounts.
• The issue numbers on GitHub should be the same as the ticket numbers in Trac.
• Links to the old Trac installation will be forwarded to the corresponding issues on GitHub.
• The FAQ that’s currently hosted on Trac as well might be moved to GitHub or a separate web page as well. If I decide to do that I’ll have links to the old FAQ be forwarded to the new location, too.

Here’s some background information how I came to this decision:

Over the last couple of months the amount of spam has increased significantly. Even though I required verified user accounts before anyone can open a ticket there were bots that created such accounts automatically, handled the email verification and posted spam tickets afterwards. I had to clean up this mess time and again.

I had been using a Captcha plugin for registration as a countermeasure. Unfortunately that plugin is no longer compatible with the user management plugin (and a plain Trac installation doesn’t have any user registration capabilities on its own, so you have to rely on third-party addons for such tasks).

A second countermeasure I had deployed was administrator approval. Each newly registered account had to be approved by me, and I was getting pretty good at sniffing out obvious spam accounts. However, I sometimes erred, on both sides: spammers were still getting through and posting their crap while legitimate users weren’t allowed to post and complained via private emails. This countermeasure also meant that I received around 50 emails a day about new accounts having been created.

So that’s why I don’t want to host my own bug tracker anymore.