Make filtering tickets more obvious

A non-insignificant amount of my users don't know how to use the Dev Bukkit ticket tracker. I get multiple PMs a month of users screaming "why did you delete my ticket" (in all caps) when I mark their tickets as duplicates of existing tickets, or that they don't know how to search for closed tickets. It turns out none of them know how to actually use the "Filters" button to click the "Status" popdown and select "All" to see everything. Even after explaining this to them, they're still confused. Alternatively, they can go to http://dev.bukkit.org/home/tickets/ page to see their tickets if they're the one who submitted the ticket, although that doesn't help for users who need to search for other tickets.

It seems there is a pattern going on. I don't know if this is a case of "can't fix stupid", or if there are some UI design tweaks with the bug tracker that can be made make this easier for less tech savvy users. So here I am throwing this out to the community to see if anybody has any good ideas on how to solve this issue.

Some quick I have off the top of my head that unfortunately require work for the dev bukkit team. I have no idea how easy any of these would be to implement

1. Have a counter in the upper right hand corner next to "PMs" that says "Tickets". This would act like the PM counter, and change whenever a ticket of yours as a ticket maintainer, as a reporter, or when "tracking a ticket", has been updated since the last time you've "seen" the ticket. Clicking this would bring you to http://dev.bukkit.org/home/tickets/
2. On http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/<project>/tickets/ make the "Filters" popdown section open by default and/or change the color to something other than grey.

The first solution would probably fix the issue for those submitting tickets, and would be really nice for other use cases as well, but likely requires some backend work. This also doesn't fix the issue for those who don't know how to use the search function. The second solution seems easier and could be as easy as a CSS fix, however, I don't know howe well it will solve the problem.