customizable fields and being able to create your own reports is something I think would really benefit mantis. I hope we can see this atleast one day in the near future.

Full ACK. Lowering the barriers to submitting bug reports is always a benefit.

There is the need to strike the balance between stooping to laziness and requiring enough information to be able to fix the issue. THis sort of thing is on the long term roadmap.

Please make the report forms table driven. For example the following table could be used to create your advanced report form:

Field Action Access Default
Category, Required, >=reporter,
Reproducibility, Required, >=reporter, always
Severity, Required, >=reporter, minor
Profile, Optional, >=reporter,
Platform, Optional, >=reporter,
OS, Optional, >=reporter,
Assign To, Optional, >=Developer,
Summary, Required, >=reporter,
Descrpition, Required, >=reporter,
Steps to Reproduce Optional, >=Developer,
Additional Info, Optional, >=reporter,
Upload file Optional, >=reporter, false
Report Stay Optional, >=reporter,

A super simple form might look like:

Summary, Required, >=reporter
Descrpition, Required, >=reporter
Category, Optional, >=reporter
Reproducibility, Optional, >=reporter, N/A
Severity, Optional, >=reporter, minor

Obviously this is a first cut that may not have the features you really need, but you can see that such a table would allow users to easily customize bug reporting screens from kitchen sink - to description only.

Summary and description are now the only two required fields. Th drop downs are automatically set on some valid entry.

I'll see about the table driven selectable inputs. Probably roll something in 0.18.0

This will be achieved when template support is implemented.