Bug trackers could work but someone would have to maintain it and filter through all of the responses including likely thousands of non-technical users who are reporting bugs that aren't.
I worked in tech support for 5 years and although we encouraged our user base to report issues and come to us with problems for all kinds of support, the number of actual bugs we found in the product we were using as a result of user response was extremely low (like 2%).
So there is a break even point between having useful testing feedback and just having a wad of unusable data. The forums at least has a weeding out process that occurs naturally through discourse.
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