As somebody who has done a smattering of QA work in the past and as a programmer myself, I see a lot of posts that, while not unreadable by any means could use improvement. With that in mind, I decided I would try to write out a few tips for making bug reports easier to understand, find, and ultimately get fixed presented in a nice simple tl;dnr version followed by a more in depth explanation. This is not intended to replace the SD bug reporting guidelines post which outlines several steps you need to take, but rather a more general style and good practice guide.

This being said, I am far from being a QA expert. My experience was limited to non-critical tool testing for a small linguistics company as part of my miscellaneous things to do as an intern so any suggestions, critiques, additions, copy-edits, etc. are more than welcome. I will try to add more as I notice or think of things. I will attempt to give credit to internet sources used as inspiration or reminders at the end of this post.

• Always check to see if the bug has already been reported first!
• Read all stickies in full.
• One bug per report/topic
• Create descriptive topic names that are descriptive enough to identify the gist and general cause of a bug at first glance.
• Do not post long debug dumps in-line. Use pastebin or attachments instead.
• Include exact, explicit instructions on how to reproduce an error, along with it's frequency whenever it is possible.
• If applicable, give the result that you expected as well as the actual result.
• Be explicit about what are facts, and what are speculations.
• Keep a constructive, helpful tone.

Consider this: "I started FooApp. It put up a warning window. I tried to close it and it crashed." It isn't clear what the user tried to close. Did they try to close the warning window, or the whole of FooApp? It makes a difference. Instead, you could say "I started FooApp, which put up a warning window. I tried to close the warning window, and FooApp crashed." This is longer and more repetitive, but also clearer and less easy to misunderstand. (Chiark)

edit notes: Trying to get the whitespace to "stick", not having any luck with the rich text editor and my html experience is a little too outdated. I'll make this post more readable at some point if I can.