I'll report bugs, give details — via multiple cumbersome steps, iff I can clearly track the status, follow up. Otherwise, even a one-click “send report”’popup isn't worth my effort. This is why I no longer bother reporting anything to Apple. Same crashes/errors keep on for years. I’m convinced those reports go to /fruit/null.
Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
151–160 of 226 posts
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget all major OSS repositories using a stale bot to close any issue regardless of how many people reported it or how serious it is. Close and lock at times. Yikes.
I have seen OpenZFS adopt one, but whenever I have seen a bug that has merit closed by the stale bot, it is reopened by a contributor and a not-stale flag is added to prevent it from being automatically closed again. Note that I am a contributor, but I am not one of the ones who is reopening bugs and marking them as not stale. The few times I saw such a bug and would have done it, someone else beat me to it. The stal…
I think that once a bug has been verified and keeps getting likes, it should not be closed.
If the user never responded to further questions, then absolutely.
What I see however is that maintainers themselves fight the bot removing the label and reopening issues. Over and over. Until they miss the notification.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed Yep. That has always been the general industry sentiment [1]: > Here’s another bug that’s not worth fixing: if you have a bug that totally crashes your program when you open gigantic files, but it only happens to your single user who has OS/2 and who, for all you know, d…
You missed the important part: >But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.
I wish that was the case. I suffered Crowdstrike being force installed upon all servers at a previous firm. After every system update it would "lose" it's configuration and proceed to try scanning every attached drive, some of which were in the petabytes. It's inefficient scanning process consumed 70% plus CPU and caused service outages for some users. Each time we'd ask for configuration to be added to ignore certain mount points, each time it would get turned on again. The only thing that saved us was distributing the service over multiple servers in different regions so that their updates were staggered. We spent >5% of team effort for a few years fighting Crowdstrike.
Just under a year ago they caused a global outage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...). I thought, aha finally they will pay for their sloppy software. Then I checked the share price today, it's up 20% in the last year. If a cyber security company can cause one of the largest global outages ever and go relatively unpunished, I'm not surprised some firms are not fixing bugs. Very disappointing.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#154> Even non-technical users click it just because "the little bug looked fun."
So you want non-bug reports from non-tech people. Why?
From my experience, exactly those reports are the ones that will never be addressed.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it. That's entirely the wrong take, IMO. Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.
I have a tiny bit of sympathy for this, I have received a bug report that said “Your software doesn’t work”. I’d always reply though, usually with something equally terse.
Most recently, a github user opened a issue on one of my projects and asked "Why should I use this instead of Y".
As a developer sharing my code online, I don't even know where to begin answering that.
This is typical non-tech spam.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#156The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.
Some teams have a frickin' bad attitude and couldn't care less. Try submitting a bug about how menus are displayed 5px from where they are supposed to be in a GTK app rendered on a X11-server that runs on the Windows desktop and see if the GTK developers care. Or try telling the react-testing-framework folks that they're asking me to put handrails in my bathroom when my house is burning down. Have experiences like th…
GTK is developed entirely by volunteers. None of the "rules" of bug reporting in this thread apply. If it's a business selling something to you? Sure, don't bother if they don't seem to care.
But with volunteer-driven FOSS projects, what you want as an end user is much, much lower on the list of priorities compared to a business product. Even if you have implemented the "fix" [1] yourself, they might still not accept it unless you're willing to stay around and maintain it yourself. And that's perfectly fine.
[1] Assuming that the maintainers agree that it's a bug and not a feature request in disguise.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#157The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.
This is like how I stopped reporting stolen bicycles.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#158“Stupidly easy” is bad copy imo. I honestly did not want to scroll through the front page after seeing it. In a sentence it does not have nice flow and from a business perspective it feels immature. I would tighten up that copy a lot but that is just my opinion. Also, might be in the minority but I avoid any products that put ProductHunt flags on the page, especially prominently at the top.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#159The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix.
The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#160The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix.
The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.