It is utterly essential for anyone doing tech support for large amounts of people to have some system to manage all of the important information. I was in the position of choosing such a system for a smallish help desk, which is independent of the bug reporting system used by the in house developers.

I was already intimately familiar with RequestTracker. However, I wanted something a little more light weight.

Here are a few of the aggregation of data on the subject that I utilized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_tracking_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_desk

http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/

http://www.issue-tracking-software.de/

http://www.ifdefined.com/blog/post/2007/10/Links-to-other-comparisons-of-issue-trackers.aspx

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/01/014221

This was a total data avalanche. So I made use of the complex visual data processing components of my brain and made the decision to determine the desing merit of based on their public website. It is logical when considering that I am using the product as a website.

more later.

http://www.issuetrackerproduct.com

is the solution I chose. and it is awesome. I had never used zope before, but it was 2 commands to get running in Ubuntu.