Encountered a great example of how an open issues list could help here.
I am commissioner of a yahoo fantasy league. One of the managers in my league sent me a message this morning. Apparently there was a glitch and none of the pitching stats from yesterday got applied. I clicked the help link to report it but there was no need. Right there was a list of known issues with the problem I was going to report. There was a link that took me to a page that explained yahoo was aware of the issue and engineers were actively working on the problem.
As commissioner of that league I really appreciated that. Straightforward communication. There is no substitute.
I copied the link and posted it on my league's message board. So everyone now knows what is happening. Nobody is openly upset. Blood pressure medicine prices are not skyrocketing due to increased demand. And I bet that because they have that open issues page yahoo is getting far fewer people notifying them of the problem. So their engineers are spending their time fixing the problem instead of reading emails reporting it or logging on to forums to discuss it. So it probably gets fixed a little faster further increasing customer happiness with the product.