I decided to try to be good, so I found the GNOME bugzilla and tried to search for "directory", or "rhythmbox", or anything. Every time it would spend a lot of time waiting and then just finish with a blank page. Deciding that their Bugzilla was hosed, I went and got a Launchpad account and logged it there. Then, in a fit of "but I might have just got something wrong", I went back to the Bugzilla and tried to drill down instead of typing in a keyword.
Lo and behold, when I looked for bugs relating to "Rhythmbox", it turned up in the search bar as product:rhythmbox. Sure enough, if I typed in product:rhythmbox summary:directory then it came up with bugs that mentioned 'directory' in their summary line. If you don't get one of those keywords right, it just returns the blank screen as a mute way of saying "I don't know how to deal with your search terms".
So it would seem that the GNOME bugzilla has hit that classic problem: developer blindness. The developers all know how to use it, and therefore they don't believe anyone could possibly use it any differently. This extends to asserting that anyone using it wrong is "obviously" not worth listening to, and therefore the blank page serves as a neat way of excluding anyone who doesn't know the 'right' way to log a bug. And then they wonder why they get called iconoclastic, exclusive and annoying...
Sadly, the fix is easy. If you can't find any search terms you recognise, at least warn the user. Better still, assume that all terms that aren't tagged appropriately search the summary line. But maybe they're all waiting for a patch or something...
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