I Found Two Bugs in Zulip. The Maintainers Had Filed Both Two Weeks Earlier.

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.

I went hunting in Zulip's codebase for this challenge and found two real data-corruption bugs in the Slack importer. Solid ones: silent message scrambling during workspace migrations, the kind of bug that costs somebody a re-migration.

Then I did the thing you are supposed to do before writing a single line of fix. I searched the tracker.

Issue #39650. Opened June 30, by the maintainers themselves: a systematic audit of the Slack import path, roughly a dozen items, confirmed and triaged. My two discoveries were on that list, described more precisely than I would have described them. I was two weeks late to my own findings.

This is the story of what happened next, because "what happened next" turned out to be the useful part.