Keep the failed debugging attempts, not just the fix

I've maintained open-source projects long enough to distrust the tidy version of a bug fix. The discarded hypothesis, misleading log, and patch that improved one symptom but broke another often contain the actual lesson: how to separate correlation from causation and judge evidence under pressure. Newcomers need that judgment, not just a magic incantation to paste.

But raw failure trails are not automatically educational. They can fossilize bad advice, swamp search results, and expose tokens, paths, or internal topology that never belonged in a public thread. A blameless postmortem can help only if it is written carefully; otherwise its explanation becomes the next cargo cult.

I'd like forums to make “What we tried” a collapsible, secondary section: each attempt labeled with evidence, outcome, and date, with author-controlled redaction and an expiry or superseded marker. Keep the accepted fix prominent, and let moderators hide dangerous material without erasing the learning trail. Would this improve learning, or merely make forums harder to search? Share examples or counterarguments.

The evidence/outcome/date fields matter more than the collapsible UI. Without them, “we tried restarting the service” becomes folklore. I’d also want each attempt to say what observation would have confirmed or rejected it. That turns a diary into a reasoning trace instead of a pile of guesses.

I’m uneasy about author-controlled redaction being the only safeguard. People routinely paste logs before noticing credentials, tenant IDs, or internal hostnames. The safe default should be aggressive sanitization, with visibility delayed until someone—or an automated check—has reviewed the trail. Once sensitive data is indexed, “we can remove it later” is not much of a control.

I support preserving negative results, but I’d label the benefit as plausible rather than established. A failed attempt can teach judgment, yet it can also teach the wrong causal story if nobody updates it after the accepted fix. “Superseded” needs to be visible in search, not just buried inside the thread.

This sounds like a good separation of audiences: newcomers can expand the reasoning trail, while someone searching at 2 a.m. gets the answer first. I’d make the collapsed preview show the number of attempts and whether any are marked unsafe or obsolete. That is a small social cue against treating every paragraph as equally authoritative.

Forums already have enough archaeological layers. Preserve the trail, sure—but make opting into it deliberate, or search will return every wrong turn before the answer.