Could you consider a public bug tracker like TRAC, Bugzilla, etc?  Even if read only it would let some of us confirm known issues without our time wasting time writing forum posts and wasting your time reading them.  It could allow knowledgeable community members to triage forum posts and refer some questions to already-known issues.  I am assuming that something like that is run internally.

Yes, we have an internal tracker but it's not practical to open it up to the public in its current state.

My main issue with using a public tracker is that that they all seem to either be cumbersome or riddled with security holes.  TRAC for example is a great product, but does about a million things we don't need and requires maintaining a separate Python environment for hosting.  Bugzilla is ugly and cumbersome as hell to use and again, requires mod_perl and a bunch of other stuff that we don't normally run.  There's no technical reason we couldn't install either, it's just a lot of work to maintain/audit a separate machine and/or application stack just for an issue tracker.

I've almost been considering just using a separate section of SMF as a public bug tracker.  Might be a bit hokey, but we're already maintaining it so it requires no additional maintenance/administration overhead; each thread could represent a single issue, and SMF already supports polls where people could vote to prioritize issues.

Or if anyone else has any suggestions for a bug tracker that's reasonably lightweight and has a decent security track record, I'm all ears.

Is there one as an Addon/Module for SMF  ?

I know theres one for Invision Board thats a module for it, maybe SMF has one too?

Internet Brands use JIRA for vBulletin which has a cloud version and would require no maintenance...

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing